He is also the father of American singer Norah Jones and British-American musician and sitar player Anoushka Shankar.

At age 18, he gave up dancing to pursue a career in music, studying the sitar for seven years under court musician Allauddin Khan.

In 1956, Shankar began to tour Europe and the Americas playing Indian classical music and increased its popularity there in the 1960s through teaching, performance, and his association with violinist Yehudi Menuhin and Beatles guitarist George Harrison.

Shankar was born on 7 April 1920 in Benares (now Varanasi), then the capital of the eponymous princely state, in a Bengali Hindu family, as the youngest of seven brothers.

A respected statesman, lawyer and politician, he served for several years as dewan (Prime Minister) of Jhalawar, Rajasthan, and used the Sanskrit spelling of the family name and removed its last part.

[3][10] Shyam was married to Hemangini Devi who hailed from a small village named Nasrathpur in Mardah block of Ghazipur district, near Benares and her father was a prosperous landlord.

Shyam later worked as a lawyer in London, England,[3] and there he married a second time while Devi raised Shankar in Benares and did not meet his son until he was eight years old.

[15] Shankar gave up his dancing career in 1938 to go to Maihar and study Indian classical music as Khan's pupil, living with his family in the traditional gurukul system.

[12] Khan was a rigorous teacher and Shankar had training on sitar and surbahar, learned ragas and the musical styles dhrupad, dhamar, and khyal, and was taught the techniques of the instruments rudra veena, rubab, and sursingar.

[8] He moved to Mumbai and joined the Indian People's Theatre Association, for whom he composed music for ballets in 1945 and 1946, Dharti Ke Lal, 1946.

[28] The Byrds recorded at the same studio and heard Shankar's music, which led them to incorporate some of its elements in theirs, introducing the genre to their friend George Harrison of the Beatles.

[32][33][34] While complimentary of the talents of several of the rock artists at the festival, he said he was "horrified" to see Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar on stage:[35] "That was too much for me.

[37] Shankar won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance for West Meets East, a collaboration with Yehudi Menuhin.

[47] Although interest in Indian music had decreased in the early 1970s, the live album from the concert became one of the best-selling recordings to feature the genre and won Shankar a second Grammy Award.

The demanding schedule weakened his health, and he suffered a heart attack in Chicago, causing him to miss a portion of the tour.

[50] Shankar toured and taught for the remainder of the 1970s and the 1980s and released his second concerto, Raga Mala, conducted by Zubin Mehta, in 1981.

[55] He served as a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper chamber of the Parliament of India, from 12 May 1986 to 11 May 1992, after being nominated by Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

[29] His liberal views on musical co-operation led him to contemporary composer Philip Glass, with whom he released an album, Passages, in 1990,[12] in a project initiated by Peter Baumann of the band Tangerine Dream.

[61] In the 2000s, he won a Grammy Award for Best World Music Album for Full Circle: Carnegie Hall 2000 and toured with Anoushka, who released a book about her father, Bapi: Love of My Life, in 2002.

[65] In June 2008, Shankar played what was billed as his last European concert,[41] but his 2011 tour included dates in the United Kingdom.

[70]: 114 Harrison became interested in Indian classical music, bought a sitar and used it to record the song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)".

[73] As the sitar and Indian music grew in popularity, groups such as the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Byrds began using it in some of their songs.

[80] Hans Neuhoff of Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart has argued that Shankar's playing style was not widely adopted and that he was surpassed by other sitar players in the performance of melodic passages.

[46] Shankar's interplay with Alla Rakha improved appreciation for tabla playing in Hindustani classical music.

He began an affair in 1978 with married tanpura player Sukanya Rajan, whom he had known since 1972,[108] which led to the birth of their daughter Anoushka Shankar in 1981.

The city is also where one of the miracles that have happened in my life took place: I met Ma Anandamayi, a great spiritual soul.

Sitting at home now in Encinitas, in Southern California, at the age of 88, surrounded by the beautiful greens, multi-colored flowers, blue sky, clean air, and the Pacific Ocean, I often reminisce about all the wonderful places I have seen in the world.

[118] Shankar performed his final concert with daughter Anoushka on 4 November 2012 at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California.

On 9 December 2012, Shankar was admitted to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, San Diego, California after complaining of breathing difficulties.

[119][120] The Swara Samrat festival, organized on 5–6 January 2013 and dedicated to Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, included performances by such musicians as Shivkumar Sharma, Birju Maharaj, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Zakir Hussain, and Girija Devi.