There was a time when I really, really wanted to get into Indian music. However, I lived in small town Quebec. So I used the internet (Napster then a few of Napster’s successors) and found very little in what I was really looking for: crazy-long ragas. I found a couple supposedly by Shankar (I have never been able to confirm) but not many. Listening to them in my university dorm room bothered other people. At some point my computer died and I lost the files. By the time I moved back to civilization, my desire to listen to ragas had faded enough that I have never actively sought out some genuine Indian “classical” music.

So I can’t pretend to know Shankar’s music well, and I can’t pretend to know whether he was a great sitar player or just a good one, or whether he was a great composer of ragas and other types of Indian compositions or merely just an average one. But I can testify to the enormous influence he has had on popular music.

Before Shankar began tutoring George Harrison, Indian music was influencing American music, however it was an entirely esoteric thing. Indian music first made its way into “western” music through jazz, and not just through jazz itself, which was already no longer a “popular” music, but primarily through the most radical jazz: free jazz. Until the Kinks released a song incorporating Indian drones into rock in the summer of 1965, Indian music was of interest only to musicians’ musicians; people like John Coltrane.

But with Harrison’s use of the sitar on John Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood,” suddenly the world of Indian music opened up to “west”; the most popular band in the world used an Indian instrument on record. Within months, more Indian-influenced rock was being made by others bands such as the Byrds – dubbed ‘raga rock’ retroactively – and soon there was a mania for all things Indian: not just Indian musical ideas and Indian instruments – such as the swordmandel – but Indian spirituality and Indian dress. For a brief period from about the summer of 1966 to the sometime during 1968 or 1969, Indian culture was extraordinarily popular in the “west.” We know this as the psychedelic era.

There have been a number of musical revivals of this music, starting in the early ’80s underground rock scene, but occurring fairly regularly since. Someone somewhere has probably been making so-called neo-psychedelia pretty much constantly since the early ’80s. And, moreover, many of the musical ideas of psychedelic rock have been absorbed into the pop-rock mainstream, so that music that isn’t overtly psychedelic still incorporates some basic Indian musical ideas, even if the songwriters and performers aren’t aware of that themselves.

And this is what Ravi Shankar did and this is why he matters to us, not just people who actually listen to Indian music. He taught George Harrison and now we have this world with no musical boundaries. Even if we have never heard a note of Ravi Shankar’s actual music, we should pause and think about the musical world we live in. Without people like Shankar, we wouldn’t have the variety we have today.