String meister

Pickings

The most well-known face among India's artistes, Ravi Shankar has received both brickbats and bouquets, in equal measure, for popularising Indian classical music in the West.

The camps are clearly divided: Shankar has pandered to the West's fascination for Indian exotica and tradition, or he has helped musicians chalk out a path that was both creatively and monetarily beneficial.

Discovery Channel, as part of its Discover India series, has profiled the life and works of this celebrated musician in Ravi Shankar: Between the Worlds.

The two-part programme will premiere today at 9 pm. The second part will be shown next Saturday, August 2. The programme has been filmed for over two years in India and the US.

What will be of interest to musicians and music lovers is the archival footage used in the film. It is arguable if the film is a definitive account of the sitar maestro's life, but it does trace his life from the beginning, when at the age of nine years he joined his elder brother Uday Shankar's dance troupe. Later, he apprenticesed under the famous Allauddin Khan of the Senia-Maihar gharana.

The film showcases Shankar's interactions with some of the big names in Western music "" classical, jazz and pop. That part includes footage of him teaching George Harrison the sitar.

Also part of the film is his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival. Then there are encounters with Yehudi Menuhin and John Coltrane. Interestingly, Coltrane named his son Ravi.

Selections from Shankar's performances from 1954 onwards, including concerts with Alla Rakha and Zakir Hussain, are judiciously intercut with Shankar's views on music, spiritualism, influences, fame and a host of other topics, including his bewilderment at the Western pop scene to which he was catapulted in the 1960s.

The Discover India series hopes to take viewers beyond cliched images of India to focus on the cultural traditions in performing arts, art forms, cuisine and music.