London: Sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar has said that he found hard to say no to free love, which gave him and others a lot of happiness and sorrow.

"Whatever happened, it was spontaneous. The spontaneity was always there; it gave me and others a lot of happiness for some time, but it brought sorrow also," Shankar said, commenting on his love life in the 'The Times' daily on May 13.

Asked whether it caused him grief looking back on his love life, 82-year-old Shankar said, "It is a mixed feeling, you know. I am grateful for everything that I got, but I had to pay for it with pain and torture."

Answering a question whether he is friends with all the women now, he said, "Many are dead and gone. A couple of them I still meet and try and be friendly with. With some, of course, things are not good."

Shankar married Annapurna, the daughter of his guru when he was 21, but they were ill matched and broke up after a few years, though it was decades before Annapurna granted him a divorce. He has two children out of the wedlock.

The ensuing years sound wild. In his autobiography 'Raga Mala' he says, "I felt I could be in love with different women in different places. It was like having a girl in every port – and sometimes there was more than one!"

From the late 1940s, however, his main girlfriend was a dancer, Kamal Shastri, and from 1967 until 1981 they lived together "as man and wife".

In 1972, he met the 18-year-old Sukanya Rajan, who played the tanpura at his concerts.

In 1978, although she too was married, they became lovers. In 1981, Anoushka was born.

Meanwhile, in America, Ravi Shankar was having an affair with the New York concert producer Sue Jones, who gave birth to Norah (or Geetali, as she was originally known) in 1979. For the first two years of her life, he divided his affections between them and Kamala until Kamala, after three decades, finally quit him.

Coincidentally, the next year his divorce from his wife came through.

At first he chose to be with Sue. But in 1986 their relationship ended, although he remained close to Norah. In 1989, after much prevarication, he decided to marry Sukanya, at which point Sue banned him from seeing Norah.

On what really made someone who seems so calm and has brought so much serenity into other people's lives have such a turbulent private life, he said, "I am amazed myself."

Perhaps generating so much musical emotion made him fall in love too easily?

"And also travelling," he says prosaically. "The loneliness and being every time in a new place. I could not help it. It is not that I was a Don Juan or a sex maniac or anything like that. Also I had the opportunity. I did not have to go and hunt or do anything like that."

Women hunted him?

He laughs. "Whatever happened, it was spontaneous. The spontaneity was always there; it gave me and others a lot of happiness for some time, but it brought sorrow also."

But now he wishes Sukanya had come earlier to his life. "She is the best thing that has happened to me and I am so grateful."

PTI