← Back to Countries

India

A rejected score, then a new composer

Ravi Shankar

For the 1966 film Chappaqua, director Conrad Rooks first commissioned a free-jazz score from Ornette Coleman, then rejected it because he felt its beauty would overpower the film. Columbia released the abandoned score on its own. What made the cut was a raga-rooted score composed by Ravi Shankar and recorded in Paris, and Shankar himself appears on screen as a sun god. The session's real afterlife belonged to a young American hired to transcribe Shankar's music into Western notation: Philip Glass, then studying under Nadia Boulanger. Glass later said that stripping out the barlines to find the music's underlying cycle was the breakthrough that fed straight into the repeating, cyclical language of his minimalism.

The sarangi played like a voice

Ustad Sultan Khan

Sultan Khan learned the sarangi from childhood under his father, Ustad Gulab Khan, in the Sikar gharana, and made his professional debut on All India Radio at twenty. He became the instrument's leading modern player, prized for a vocal-style expressiveness that could sound more like singing than bowing. Khan accompanied Lata Mangeshkar, played George Harrison's 1974 Dark Horse tour alongside Ravi Shankar, scored the funeral scenes in Gandhi, and co-founded the fusion group Tabla Beat Science with tabla player Zakir Hussain. Hussain later wrote that Khan's sarangi "literally sang."

Tabla royalty, a Grammy milestone

Ustad Zakir Hussain

Zakir Hussain started tabla at seven with his father, the great Alla Rakha, and by his twenties had moved to the Bay Area. From there he crossed straight into Western music. He toured with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, co-founded the fusion group Shakti with guitarist John McLaughlin, and won the first-ever Best World Music Album Grammy for Hart's Planet Drum. At the 2024 Grammys he became the first Indian musician to win three awards in a single night. He died in San Francisco in December 2024, at seventy-three. His Shakti bandmate John McLaughlin called him "the King, in whose hands, rhythm became magic."

A violin score for Salaam Bombay!

L. Subramaniam

L. Subramaniam trained on violin from age five under his father. Later he added an MBBS medical degree and a composition degree from CalArts, and his career eventually paired him with Yehudi Menuhin, Stéphane Grappelli and the New York Philharmonic. In 1988 he composed and performed the score for Mira Nair's debut feature Salaam Bombay!, a film about Mumbai's street children that premiered at Cannes, won the Caméra d'Or there, and went on to an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. The soundtrack sets Carnatic violin inside a Western session-musician arrangement. It was one of the earliest and most visible bridges between the two traditions in film music.

Sitar and Moog, Los Angeles 1970

Ananda Shankar

Ananda Shankar, Ravi Shankar's nephew, trained separately, under Lalmani Misra at Banaras Hindu University. In 1970 he released a self-titled album in Los Angeles that put his sitar next to an early Moog synthesizer and a rock rhythm section built around Elvis Presley's touring bassist. It included raga-rock covers of The Doors and the Rolling Stones, which became rare-groove club staples decades later. Two years earlier he'd turned down an offer to record with Jimi Hendrix, saying simply, "it wouldn't be my music. So I made the album alone." He went on composing prolifically for Bengali and Hindi films until his death in 1999.

A Bengali mystic's devotional chant

Anandamayi Ma

Anandamayi Ma was born Nirmala Sundari in a Bengal village in 1896 and became one of twentieth-century India's most widely revered spiritual figures. She drew followers from Dhaka to Varanasi and inspired a passage in Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. From her youth she was known for falling into spontaneous, ecstatic states during kirtan, and nightly devotional chanting was part of her practice for decades. The ashrams that grew up around her still keep an active tradition of recorded kirtan singing, and recordings credited to her directly preserve it in her own voice. She died in 1982. Her shrine near Haridwar is still a pilgrimage site.

Founder of the Kirana gharana

Abdul Karim Khan

Abdul Karim Khan was born in the village of Kairana in 1872 and trained under his father and two uncles. He then served as a court musician in Baroda, where marrying outside his position reportedly got him and his bride exiled to Bombay. The Mysore court later gave him the title Sangeet Ratna, and in 1913 he founded the Arya Sangeet Vidyalaya in Poona, where his students included Sawai Gandharva and Kesarbai Kerkar. His slow, unhurried development of a raga in vilambit laya, sung with what listeners described as perfect pitch and emotion, defined the Kirana gharana, which still carries the name of his adopted town. He died in 1937 while on a concert tour of South India.

The Collection