Farhan Akhtar to play Pandit Ravi Shankar: Decoding the sitar maestro's influence on The Beatles and George Harrison

The announcement that Farhan Akhtar will play Ravi Shankar comes with an image most people already recognise: Shankar on stage at The Concert for Bangladesh, quietly changing the rules of what popular music could be used for. That moment in 1971, when George Harrison helped organise the first major charity concert in rock history at Shankar’s urging, was not a late-career footnote. It was the culmination of an influence that had begun years earlier, when a sitar entered the Beatles’ world and refused to behave like a pop instrument.Ravi Shankar did not merely lend the Beatles a sound. He introduced them to discipline, to seriousness, and to the idea that music could carry moral weight without becoming spectacle. The sitar was not a propWhen the sitar entered Beatles music, it was immediately treated in the West as a symbol. But to Ravi Shankar, it was never symbolic. It was a demanding classical instrument rooted in lineage, years of apprenticeship, and a relationship between teacher and student that left no room for shortcuts.That difference in attitude created an early tension. Shankar would later say of the first sitar-heavy Beatles track, “I was very shocked. I didn’t like it at all.” He added, with characteristic bluntness, that it sounded “so terrible” to him. The honesty matters. This was not a guru indulging a pop experiment. It was a classical musician refusing to flatter fame.What changed his mind was not the sound, but the sincerity behind it.When Ravi Shankar first met the Beatles, he met all four. But he would later say, “I clicked immediately with George.” The reason was simple. Harrison wanted to learn properly. Shankar warned him that sitar was not like guitar, that it would take at least a year just to understand posture and tone, that fingers would bleed before they hardened. Harrison did not walk away.“He was so sweet and sincere,” Shankar said, “that I believed him.”That decision mattered. It established a relationship built not on collaboration between equals, but on apprenticeship. Harrison became a global superstar willingly placing himself in the position of a beginner, submitting to discipline in a way that fame usually prevents.The most common misunderstanding of Ravi Shankar’s influence is that it turned the Beatles into Indian musicians. It did not. What it did was change their musical imagination. Indian classical music introduced ideas that Western pop had little use for at the time: drones instead of constant chord changes, circular structures instead of linear builds, patience instead of payoff. These ideas seeped into the Beatles’ work even when no sitar was present.By the time Harrison wrote songs like “Within You Without You,” the influence was no longer decorative. The song was not trying to sound Indian. It was trying to think differently about time, ego, and self.For Harrison, Ravi Shankar’s influence quickly moved beyond music. Through him, Harrison encountered a culture where spirituality was not confined to private belief. “Their religion is every second and every minute of their lives,” Harrison once observed after spending time in India.That immersion sharpened his discomfort with the emptiness of fame. Harrison later reflected that while psychedelic drugs gave him a glimpse of unity, “LSD isn’t a real answer.” Discipline mattered more than sensation. Practice mattered more than revelation.Ravi Shankar embodied that distinction. He was deeply uneasy with how Indian music became entangled with drugs in the Western imagination. As he put it, when Indian culture collided with the hippie movement, it got mixed up with “drugs and Kamasutra and hash and all that,” something he said he “always fought.”His message to Western audiences was direct: “Don’t come high. I will make you high.”Ravi Shankar was never under the illusion that the Beatles had suddenly become classical musicians. But he understood something else. Through them, Indian ideas were reaching audiences that classical concerts never would.Harrison, in turn, understood his role. He once said he felt that his job was “to get a message through” and then “get back out of this material world.” That sense of artistic vocation, of music as service rather than self-expression, sits squarely within the philosophical frame he absorbed from Indian thought.This is why the influence did not end with the 1960s.Long after the Beatles broke up, Harrison remained deeply involved in Ravi Shankar’s work, including devotional projects that had no commercial safety net. Shankar spoke of their relationship in familial terms, saying, “He is like my son,” and noting the “tremendous respect” Harrison always showed him.That longevity punctures the idea that India was a fashionable phase for the Beatles. For Harrison, it became a framework for living with fame while resisting its claims on the soul.The depth of that bond was personal too: when Harrison’s son was born in 1978, he named him Dhani Harrison, drawing on Indian language and symbolism, a quiet sign that Ravi Shankar’s influence had moved from music into family and inheritance.The standard story credits the Beatles with opening Western ears to India. The more accurate version is more uncomfortable. Ravi Shankar forced Western pop culture to confront a tradition that could not be easily simplified, sped up, or consumed without effort.He insisted on seriousness in a world addicted to spectacle. He reminded the most famous band on the planet that depth demands submission, not just curiosity.If Farhan Akhtar’s casting prompts a renewed look at that influence, it is a useful moment. Ravi Shankar was not an exotic flourish in the Beatles’ story. He was a corrective force, shaping not just how they sounded, but how one of them learned to live with the burden of being heard by the world.