Ravi Shankar

Indian sitar player (1920–2012)

Thirteen recordings in this catalogue carry his name, and all thirteen are one film.

He was not a film composer. He was the sitarist - by a distance the best-known Indian musician in the world, the man who played Monterey and Woodstock, taught George Harrison, and organised the Concert for Bangladesh - and he scored features only a handful of times in a very long life.

Meera, in 1979, is one of them. Gulzar directed it, between Kinara and Angoor. The songs are Meerabai's own sixteenth-century padas rather than anything written for the film. Lata Mangeshkar declined to sing them, so the entire soundtrack went to Vani Jairam, who won the Filmfare for Mere To Giridhar Gopal.

So the score is a sitarist setting a dead poet's verse for a singer who got the job because somebody else turned it down - and it is the only work of his on this site.

The film was admired and did not sell, which was the usual fate of serious Hindi cinema in 1979.

Dates and credits from Wikidata.