Korla Pandit the Indian Music Maestro?

Unless you hail from the United States and are of a certain age, the name of Korla Pandit may not be familiar to you. It certainly wasn’t to me. However, despite the fact that I live on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean to have been conversant with the career of the talented musician, his story is a fascinating one nonetheless.

Born in New Delhi, India in 1921, Korla Pandit was the son of a French opera singer and an Indian government official. He was raised in an upper class household, and came to England as a child in order to study music. At the age of twelve he emigrated to the United States, where he went on to study at the University of Chicago. His talent as a keyboard player was soon recognised, and coupled with his exotic Indian background, of which little was known to Americans at the time, he was soon in much demand. By the late 1940s, he was appearing regularly on radio shows, Chandu the Magician and Hollywood Holiday, and by 1949 he even had his own television programme, Korla Pandit’s Adventures in Music. As his career developed, his shows became known for a blending of both his music and his spiritual ideology, of which he frequently spoke to the enchantment of his many admirers.


Korla Pandit

Fame and fortune had come his way and his acquaintances included the actor Errol Flynn, comedian Bob Hope, and Paramahansa Yogananda, the Indian spiritual leader of the Self Realisation Fellowship. On the nightclub circuit, he often performed with another up and coming pianist who went by the name of Liberace. Indeed, it has been suggested that in some ways, Pandit made Liberace into the consummate performer. Little eccentricities, such as occasionally gazing up from the piano to engage the audience, were nuances Liberace took from Pandit’s performance and worked into his own. However, by the 1970s his television work had begun to dry up, and so he supplemented his income with personal appearances and concerts. Fortunately, his career was revived in the 1990s, when a new generation of followers were attracted to his oriental charms. Korla Pandit died in California in October 1998. He was survived by his wife and two sons.

All very interesting, but not an exceptional tale, you’re probably thinking, and you’d be right. However, the best is yet to come, as the truly interesting part of this story only came to light after his death. In 2001, R.J. Smith, editor of the Los Angeles magazine, published an article that blew Korla Pandit’s ancestry claims out of the water. Whilst he had indeed been born on 16 September 1921, his real name had been John Roland Redd, and he had come into the world, not in India, but in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States. His father, Ernest Redd, had been an African-American Baptist pastor, and his mother was of Anglo-African ancestry. Consequently, John had comparatively light skin and straight hair, making it relatively easy for him to pass himself off as being of Indian descent. But why the deception?

Being an African-American, his opportunities in the early twentieth century United States were severely limited. A colour bar existed at the time, making it virtually impossible for African-American artists to perform. He would not have been allowed to join the Musicians Union, and most venues refused to hire African-American performers. To circumvent this bar, John initially adopted the name Juan Rolando, and claimed to be Mexican. However, by the 1940s, he and his wife, Beryl, had hit upon the notion of creating the entirely new and exotic persona of Korla Pandit. Beryl designed the make-up and clothing, which included an elaborate turban.

Unlike many performers who may choose to use a stage name for professional reasons, Redd had to maintain the persona of Korla Pandit continually in both his public and private life, as to have revealed his true identity to anyone, would have risked his entire career and livelihood. Even later in life, when the colour bar no longer existed in the United States, Redd chose not to divulge his true ethnicity. Presumably, he felt that to have done so might have damaged his career, even in those more enlightened times.

Redd kept in touch with his extended family, although he always wore his turban, and did not bring his own family with him when making visits. His nephew, Ernest Redd, commented “Among the family we knew what he was doing and very little was said about it. There was times where he would come by, and it was kind of like a sneak visit. He might come at night sometime and be gone before we got up. He had to separate himself from the family to a certain extent. They would go to see him play, but they wouldn’t speak to him. They would go to his show and then they would leave, and the family would greet him at a later time.” So successful was his deception, that even his sons were not aware of his, and their, African-American heritage.

A documentary about the life of John Roland Redd was released in 2014 entitled Korla, which was cast as a classic American story of self-invention. All very well, but it is surely something of an abomination, that in the supposed land of the free, he was forced to live a lie just because of his ethnicity.

Sources:
https://www.messynessychic.com/2019/07/11/the-tale-of-Hollywood’s-most-curious-career-imposter/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korla_Pandit/