Kamala Chakravarty

Kamala Chakravarty (born Saraswati Kamala Shastri, 1928) is an Indian classical musician and former dancer, known for her association with sitar maestro Ravi Shankar. From 1967 until the late 1970s, she accompanied Shankar, in the role of tambura player and singer, in a number of acclaimed performances, including the Monterey International Pop Festival (1967), his Human Rights Day duet with violinist Yehudi Menuhin (1967), the Concert for Bangladesh (1971) and the Music Festival from India (1974). She also lived with Shankar as his wife from 1967 to 1981, during which he was still married to musician and teacher Annapurna Devi.

While in her teens, Chakravarty trained and performed with Uday Shankar's dance company. She is the younger sister of noted Hindustani classical vocalist Lakshmi Shankar and the widow of Bombay film director Amiya Chakravarty.

Kamala Chakravarty was born in Madras, south India, in 1928. Her father was R.V. Shastri, editor of Mahatma Gandhi's reformist newspaper Harijan. Along with her elder sister, Lakshmi Shastri, she studied at dance pioneer Uday Shankar's India Culture Centre, an academy based at Almora, in the remote north Indian state of Uttarakhand. Her teachers in the various classical dance traditions included Sankaran Namboodri (for Kathakali), Kandappan Pillai (Bharata Natyam) and Amobi Sinha (Manipuri).

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