Uday Shankar, continued
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Prima ballerina Anna Pavlova asked young Uday Shankar to help her create Indian dances, and became his partner in the Radha Krishna dance in 1923-24. (Collection of Amala Shankar, Calcutta) |
When I started researching Shankar’s life and art in the early 1980s, he had recently died and was known mainly to those in India who had seen or heard of his splendid dance, as well as those notable artists out of India who encountered him in his prime years, 1931-1938. Many people, however, were unaware of his importance. They didn’t know that he was the initiator of India’s modern dance traditions, a key impetus for the reclaiming or renaissance of Indian classical dance forms, a founder of cultural centers for the study of dance and other arts, and the first Indian to perform in significant venues for Indian dance in Europe and North America. Nor did many people understand that western perceptions of Indian stage dance were shaped by the world tours of the Uday Shankar Company of Hindu Dancers and Musicians in the 1930s. And practically no one except Indian experts and a few western devotees knew that Uday Shankar was not only the elder brother of famed sitarist Pandit Ravi Shankar, but that it was because of him that Ravi Shankar had become a musician and artist of the world.
Of course the audience for a biography of Shankar extends beyond those knowledgeable few (whose numbers diminish with the passing years) to those who will know of his beauty, his genius, and his contributions only through books, occasional re-creations of his works, and his single film, Kalpana (Imagination). So in writing Uday’s biography I keep in mind an audience of readers from several generations, as well as from multiple cultures.
In addition, there is the importance of situating Shankar historically. His major contributions came during the period preceding Indian independence, during the last years of colonial rule, when Gandhi was meeting the British in his dhoti in London, and Indians were actively nationalistic, provoked and affirmed by the Congress Party. Uday Shankar’s father was his mentor and advisor; he inhabited a world of Sanskrit scholarship and Indian princely states, living comfortably both in India and in England. Uday Shankar, a Bengali Brahmin, was raised in a village near Benaras and in the princely state of Jhalawar, where his father held a series of official posts in this small Rajasthani kingdom. His education continued in Bombay and in London, where he went to join his father in 1920. So when he sailed back to India at age 30, after ten consecutive years in Europe and America, he had to rediscover his land. After a year he left India again, taking his family to Paris, the base for his first dance company of Indian artists, co-founded with Swiss sculptress Alice Boner.
So Uday Shankar was an expatriate, a Europeanized Indian, a self-made artiste, a non-observant Hindu Brahmin, and a handsome presence who loved women. His personal and professional life are an intertwined whole, so trying to separate private events from public ones is contra-indicated, although the whole is not without controversy. Still it is to India’s dance art that he made his most impressive contributions. He practically reinvented Indian dance single-handedly. He placed it on stage in technically up-to-date settings, realizing an aesthetic which affirmed the spirituality expected by western audiences and the Indianness claimed by Indian ones, as discussed in my 1987 article, “Performance as Translation: Uday Shankar in the West.” So why is it, in the 1980s and 1990s that few in India want to acknowledge his influence on their works?
The renaissance in Indian dance, which began in the late 1920s, and flowered in the 1930s, is irretrievably part of Uday Shankar’s story. In my article, “Dance Discourses: Rethinking the History of the ‘Oriental Dance’” I have addressed this interrelationship. Shankar found Balasaraswati in Madras during his 1933 tour, and invited her to join his company for a visit in Calcutta in 1934. He presented his repertoire to Indian audiences during this tour, and enthralled spectators who had seen no other stage dance in India except foreign visitors such as Denishawn, who toured in 1926. He took as his guru the Kathakali dance-drama master, Shankaran Namboodiri, and worked with him on successive visits to India. And he promoted classical dance in his Almora Culture Centre, with four gurus presiding over Kathakali, Bharatanatyam, Manipuri, and Hindustani Sangeet (North Indian classical music). But by 1935 during his second tour in India, a few Indians had seen the devadasi dance renamed as Bharatanatyam. They questioned whether Shankar’s dance was Indian, was authentic, was classical, and should be called ‘ballet’.
Three years after Indian independence in 1947, when the national academy of performing arts, Sangeet Natak Akademi, reconceptualized India’s arts, the few classical dance styles and the myriad Indian folk dances became their focus. Uday Shankar’s creative dance was not in the picture, though he had made India his permanent base since 1938. For the new nation, unity in diversity (a kind of echo of the American e pluribus unum), infused cultural policy as well as politics. Dance was to be either classical or folk, and there was no room for new traditions, such as that of Shankarstyle dance. |
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