Asian Music Circle
Founded by Indian writer and former political activist Ayana Angadi and his English wife, Patricia Fell-Clarke, a painter and later a novelist, the organisation was run from their family home in the north London suburb of Finchley.
Asian Music Circle co-founder Ayana Deva Angadi came to London from Bombay, India, in 1924,[1] to gain the qualifications necessary for a top position in the Indian Civil Service, under what was then British imperial rule.
[2] Angadi's 1942 treatise Japan's Kampf impressed Britain's wartime Ministry of Information, but following the war, the authorities suspected him of being an agent for Soviet Russia's Cominform bureau.
[5] The Angadis lived on the top floor of the Fell-Clarke family residence, in the north London suburb of Hampstead, before Patricia's inheritance allowed them to purchase their own home,[5] a large house at 116 Fitzalan Road, Finchley.
: Stories and Histories of the Indian Subcontinent After Independence, author and journalist Reginald Massey writes that all the Angadi children were "brilliant and beautiful", with the youngest, Chandrika (or Clare), becoming the first Asian model to appear in Vogue magazine.
[6][17] Patricia was appointed chairperson of the Hampstead Artists Council in 1953, and among her portrait subjects were Labour MP Fenner Brockway and the American classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin.
[19][20] In his 2006 book The Dawn of Indian Music in the West, author Peter Lavezzoli writes of the violinist's role in the AMC: "Menuhin was the ideal candidate for its leadership.
[26] The Open University's Making Britain project has similarly written of the AMC's achievements: "This organization introduced Indian music, dance and yoga to the British public, paving the way for musicians such as Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan.
"[3] In 1955, through his role as AMC president, Menuhin gained funding from the Ford Foundation and John D. Rockefeller's Asia Society to stage the Living Arts of India Festival, in New York.
[27] His original choice for the festival's featured musical performer was Ravi Shankar, after Menuhin had attended a private concert by the sitar virtuoso while in Delhi, in February 1952.
[28] Shankar was forced to turn down the opportunity, in an effort to save his failing marriage to Annapurna Devi, and instead recommended his brother-in-law, master sarod player Ali Akbar Khan.
Iyengar's visits to London in the early 1960s, he began holding instruction classes at the Fitzalan Road house, with future author and yoga practitioner Silva Mehta in attendance.
Sikh stepped out wearing a purple turban, green raw silk coat, white jodhpurs, gold slippers and an oriental dagger with a gem-studded hilt, the Irish attendant did not bother to take more than a passing glance.
The instructors – a married couple named Krishna Rao and Chandrabhaga Devi – went on to form a dance company with their students and tour throughout Britain, Ireland and Belgium.
[52] In October 1965, Martin was producing a session for the Beatles song "Norwegian Wood",[53] which featured George Harrison playing sitar, an instrument that the guitarist had never before used on a recording.
[25] The meeting occurred on 1 June 1966[69] when the Angadi family hosted a dinner to honour Shankar, who was in the UK for a series of performances that would include his historic duet with Menuhin at the Bath Musical Festival.
[75] The meeting at Fitzalan Road is covered in Ajoy Bose's 2021 documentary The Beatles and India, in which Shankara Angadi describes McCartney as seeming out of his depth, but not Harrison, who Boyd says must have known Shankar "in a past life".
[76] In his review of the film for Uncut, Pete Paphides terms this initial meeting at the AMC a "momentous encounter", given the cultural impact of the Beatles' association with India.
[81] Aside from the Western string orchestration arranged and overdubbed by Martin,[82] and Beatles assistant Neil Aspinall playing one of the tambura parts,[83] Harrison and the Indian players were the only musicians on the track.
[79] Research undertaken by the University of Liverpool's Department of Music has since identified the four musicians as Anna Joshi, Amrit Gajjar (both dilruba), Buddhadev Kansara (tambura) and Natwar Soni (tabla).
[89] Looking for greater authenticity, he then travelled to Bombay in January 1968[90] and recorded at HMV Studios with musicians including Shivkumar Sharma, Aashish Khan and Hariprasad Chaurasia.
