Vitro Nasu

Ravi Shanker passed away in San Diego.

Nytimes obit here.

Philip Glass had two teachers one was Nadia Boulanger and another Ravi Shankar.

Chappaqua

(Ravi Shankar on Dick Cavett)

See Drawings of Francesco Clemente – Ravi’s soundtrack

Film “Charley” composed by Ravi Shankar..

Ravi Shankar and George We are missing you (youtube)

Ali Akbar Khan (Ravi’s brother in law and a musical partner – previous post)

The Song of the little road

See Pather Panchali 1955 (Song of the Little Road) Bangla Movie Full- starting with Ravi Shankar soundtrack

Radha Giving Butter-Milk to Krishna, illustration to Bihari’s Sat Saiya, Basohli, c. 1690

See more Basoli paintings

Shahzia Sikander

Avatar of Vishnu
Buddha as the 9th Avatar of Vishnu

F. Clementi

The words English owes to India

A – atoll, avatar
B – bandana, bangle, bazaar, Blighty, bungalow
C – cashmere, catamaran, char, cheroot, cheetah, chintz, chit, chokey, chutney, cot, cummerbund, curry
D – dinghy, doolally, dungarees
G – guru, gymkhana
H – hullabaloo
J – jodhpur, jungle, juggernaut, jute
K – khaki, kedgeree
L – loot
N – nirvana
P – pariah, pashmina, polo, pukka, pundit, purdah, pyjamas
S – sari, shampoo, shawl, swastika
T – teak, thug, toddy, typhoon
V – veranda
Y – yoga

The Original Pundits

These early 007′s were primarily gatherers of information for mapmakers, though each received a secret code name like NA, RN, PA, GK, GM, GNM, etc. They were given the honorary designation of Pundit, meaning scholarly or wise and were the model for Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.

Ravi Shankar and George We are missing you (youtube)

Ali Akbar Khan

Radha’s dance (Film within the film, the dance from The River directed by Jean Renoir)

Gardens of Dreams
Khan was born in what is today Bangladesh in 1922 and held his first performance in the United States in 1955. He opened a music school in Berkeley in 1967, later moving it to San Rafael.

NYtimes obit

Ali Akbar Khan, the foremost virtuoso of the lutelike sarod, whose dazzling technique and gift for melodic invention, often on display in concert with his brother-in-law Ravi Shankar, helped popularize North Indian classical music in the West, died on Thursday at his home in San Anselmo, Calif. He was 87.

Ali Akbar Khan with Ravi Shankar
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Sarod Maetro Ali Akbar Akbar Khan Dies (World music central org)

Learning the ragas and mastering the instrument were both difficult challenges. Ali Akbar sais, “If you practice for 10 years, you may please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist-then you may please even God.”

His film scores, including Chetan Anand’s Aandhiyan, Satyajit Ray’s Devi, Merchant-Ivory’s The Householder, and Tapan Sinha’s Kshudista Pashan (“Hungry stones”), for which he won the “Best Musician of the Year” award. Later in 1993, he would score some of the music for Bernardo Bertolucci Little Buddha.[9]

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Rhada dance sequence from Jean’s Renoir “Le Fleuve” or the River.

This dance scene is part of story within a story. Radha plays a mixed race character called Melanie in this coming of age film.

The review of “The River by Beth Gilligan

Interestingly, Melanie’s character does not appear in the Godden novel, but was added by Renoir, who wanted a non-colonialist voice to be heard in his film

Who is Radha?