Lakshminarayana Shankar (born 26 April 1950), better known as L. Shankar, Shankar and Shenkar, is an Indian violinist, singer and composer.

Shankar was born in Madras, India, and raised in Ceylon (current-day Sri Lanka), where his father V. Lakshminarayana, a violinist and singer, worked as a teacher at the Jaffna College of Music. He learned to play the violin and first performed in public in a Ceylonese temple at the age of seven. In 1969, he went to the United States, where he studied ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University. After performing with various Indian singers for several years, Shankar founded a trio with his brothers, L. Vaidyanathan and L. Subramaniam, that performed throughout India.