Indian-American rapper-songwriter Raja Kumari has paid a tribute to the late Grammy award-winner sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar and said that he was the first person to bless her.

Raja Kumari took to Instagram, where she shared a throwback photograph of herself as a child posing with the sitar maestro.

She wrote: "Pandit Ravi Shankar was the first person to bless me in my artistic career. Whenever I doubted myself, I always remembered his words anointing me and felt that I could do anything."

Raja Kumari said she used this image of him as a blessing.

"I decided to use the image of him blessing me as the cover art for Believe in You...because in all essences, his blessings were always a reminder of why I should believe in myself #100yearsravishankar," she wrote.

April 7, 2020, marked the 100th birth anniversary of Pandit Ravi Shankar