“She was a rishi of music,” says Dr Sunil Shastri, musician and scholar, of his guru Annapurna Devi. Her life, her approach to music, can only be compared to that of the yogis meditating in icy caves ...

There is a mystique that surrounds Annapurna Devi—unprecedented in the era of celebrity musicians—that makes her practically unknowable to music lovers. With her death in Mumbai on 13 October, at the ...

Known to a tight circle of disciples and students as ‘Guruma’, Annapurna Devi, the famously reclusive surbahar player and a teacher to the likes of Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, Nityanand Haldipur and ...

Annapurna Devi’s musical career lasted only a few years. She was, as her biographer Swapan Kumar Bandopadhyay correctly described in the title of his book, ‘An Unheard Melody’. Hardly any recording ...

This was the sign on the door of the Mumbai residence of one of Indian classical music’s most elusive figures. Annapurna Devi hid behind that door for decades, admitting very few people and ...

In 2000, late sitar legend Pandit Ravi Shankar’s first wife, the reclusive Annapurna Devi, discussed her torturous marriage with Man’s World’s Alif Surti, but only through handwritten notes. Mirror ...

Dissonant artistic visions drove Annapurna Devi and her husband Ravi Shankar apart, notes Swapan Kumar Bondyopadhyay. Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com March 30, 1955. The last item of the music ...

It is not uncommon to hear women instrumentalists today, but there was a time when Hindustani music was played primarily by male instrumentalists. The reasons for this phenomenon could be many and ...

This year, to honor Jerry Garcia on his Aug. 1 birthday, the Jerry Garcia Foundation is happy to announce that it has partnered with Seven Seas Music to produce its first musical release, “Annapurna’s ...

Dissonant artistic visions drove Annapurna Devi and her husband Ravi Shankar apart, notes Swapan Kumar Bondyopadhyay. Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com March 30, 1955. The last item of the music ...