Week in the Life, Ravi Shankar, New Delhi: The Beatles' sitar man on a real high

RAVI SHANKAR, who for years was castigated in his homeland for "cheapening" and "jazzifying" Indian classical music, received the prize of his life this week: President Narayanan awarded him the Bharat Ratna, the "Jewel of India", the nation's highest civilian decoration.

"I have been given numerous awards around the world," he said, "but nothing can equal the joy of being recognised in one's own country.

"I feel especially happy to get this while I am still alive." The Bharat Ratna is often awarded posthumously.

THE PRESENTATION of the award on Tuesday gave an extra lift to the homecoming of the man who introduced the rest of the world to the joys of the sitar in the Sixties.

The Pundit (his Indian honorific), whose permanent base is near San Diego, in California, had no inkling that the award was to be made until the president telephoned at 3pm on the day of his arrival from London, to let him know.

At a press conference on Monday, he conceded that his great fame abroad probably enhanced his award-worthiness at home. "It is sad to note that our country still does not take the first step to recognise its talent. Many just wallow in frustration or turn to the West."

MR SHANKAR'S most hectic bout of fame began through a chance meeting with the Beatles at a party in 1966. "I was immediately very attracted to George," he remembers, "because of his childlike simplicity and his genuine interest in Indian art and music."

George Harrison had already discovered the sitar and learnt the rudiments of how to play it from a student of Mr Shankar's. But after meeting Mr Shankar he began taking it more seriously. "He invited me to his place and started to learn," the maestro recalls.

THE UPSHOT: the Beatles went to India, learnt to meditate, gave up writing chart hits, took mind-expanding drugs, and eventually broke up.

And for Mr Shankar, too, being with the Beatles turned out to be a long, strange trip.

"I myself became a superstar," he says with a certain wonderment in his voice. "It all got very big in the United States, my agent took all these engagements without consulting me. And I ended up becoming very unhappy, because long hair and drugs doesn't go with our music.

"My guru had always been very strict: don't drink, don't eat meat, don't have sex, don't cheapen your music. At the Monterey Folk Festival I took a stand. I told the crowd - thousands and thousands - `I cannot perform unless you stop smoking. I promise I can make you high without external stimulation'."

But for India, eternally conservative despite the Kama Sutra and the sensuality of its arts, he was guilty by association with the longhairs. "From the mid-Sixties on I was condemned," he remembers. "People began to propagate the idea that it was a sacrilege what I was doing, that I was `cheapening', `jazzifying' classical music. They didn't see that it was exactly the other way round, that I was trying to put our music back on the pedestal where it belongs."

ALL THAT is forgotten. "And now I get the Bharat Ratna. I'm amazed to see how people can change their minds without realising it."

The latest visit has turned into a sort of victory lap. After the presidential phone call, he visited the legendary open air university, Shantiniketan, near Calcutta, and performed before 15,000 people.

Monday's press conference was more like a dignified love-in, with fans thinly disguised as reporters plying the small, delicately made 79-year old maestro, a little deaf but still glittery-eyed, with requests for autographs. On Tuesday he made the trip up Rajpath to the presidential palace for his gong.

ON WEDNESDAY he gave a concert at Siri Fort Auditorium, Delhi's premier concert hall. The Pundit was assisted on another sitar by his 17-year- old daughter, Anoushka. "My only student," as Mr Shankar calls her, she has been learning at his knee from the age of nine, and now accompanies him everywhere he plays.

The hall filled with the music of the sitar: metallic and zitherlike, droning like Uillean pipes, skipping and skirling like a fiddle worrying a reel; then lush and flowery and sinuously fleshy, an ascetic's fevered hallucination of paradise.