George Harrison's Involvement
Raga received a limited release, solely in the United States, and even that was only made possible through Harrison's championing of Hindustani music, and of Shankar in particular. According to Worth, the original financier for the project was forced to back out − having been committed to a psychiatric ward − after which, a special screening of Worth's footage had moved Harrison so much that within days he was offering the services of Apple Films as a distributor.
Two years before this, the well-known scene featuring the then Beatle receiving sitar tuition from Shankar had been filmed at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, on 10 June 1968. Harrison would later cite this moment and his subsequent chance meeting up with Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix in New York as pivotal in persuading him to return to his first instrument, the guitar: "By this time I had met a few hundred sitar players who were all sensational, yet Ravi had hopes for only one of them that he would be a really great sitar player.
Harrison attended a press screening of Raga at New York's Carnegie Hall Cinema on 22 November 1971, along with former bandmate John Lennon and their wives. Instead of going to the premiere the following night, Harrison appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, where he talked up the film and bemoaned the delay surrounding the release of the live album from the all-star benefit shows organized by himself and Shankar the previous August. (The Concert for Bangla Desh would finally be issued in America four weeks after Raga opened.)
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