Uday Shankar, continued
Where was Uday Shankar and his dance in this 1950s scheme? His Almora Culture Centre was disbanded in 1942, with several of his artists moving on to form their own companies. Shankar went to Madras to make his only film, Kalpana, which he showed in India and abroad in 1948-49. Praised for its dance filming, critics and audiences found Kalpana’s story troubling. It was a pre-independence narrative, and contained reminders of what was alleged to tarnish Uday’s reputation. In brilliantly creative dance scenes and less scintillating dramatic ones, Kalpana satirized Indians who tried to retain lost power after independence and showed women in competition for his favors. When Uday Shankar looked for backing for his next dance company, he found it only in Bengal, his family homeland, where he and his wife Amala eventually settled in 1956.
Pre-independence nationalism was transmuted, in the new nation, into affirmation of its ancient heritage. Despite this preference, Shankar’s new company, continuing his inventive choreographies and modernist presentations, toured in China, the United States, and Europe, straining financially in the post-war epoch. The last decades of Shankar’s life were a complex journey of success and struggle, his fame eclipsed by national promotion of classical dance as evidence of an ancient heritage and thus a place for India among the civilized nations of the world. The Uday Shankar Company persists today, based in Calcutta and led by his partner and widow, Amala Shankar.
But strikingly, in the 1980s and l990s, there has been a sea change, and it neither obliterates nor replaces the suspicion and smug dismissal of Uday Shankar which characterized his latter years and the difficult decades which followed. What has changed? How can this social history be integrated into the bio-history of Uday Shankar? This context is as much a part of his genius as is his choreography, his costumes and lights, his timing and rhythmic sense, his stage presence, and his reputation. There are, it turns out, not one, not two, not even three, but four or five twists in the Uday Shankar pathway, and they are integral to any analysis of his works, as well as to his continuing presence in the world of Indian dance and modern ideas of choreography in India.
For instance, a Bombay critic, writing of Shankar’s new ballets, Rhythm of Life and Labour and Machinery, recognized that the choreographer had enlarged his thematic reach to include Gandhi’s social philosophy of unity and castelessness. The pieces thus proffered a new nationalistic energy for progress, following a decade of religio-mythological ballets and light folk-based divertissements. After independence Shankar took the Buddha as a theme, and later he experimented in his Shankarscope production with mixed media of film and dance. Well aware that dance was for its own times and for particular audiences, Shankar wanted to try new ideas, explore new media, and consider contemporary themes. This evolutionary perspective is continued today as Indian dancers and choreographers turn to new dance, and as some recognize Shankar’s contribution to their modern art.
‘New directions in Indian dance’ has become the guiding text for the current turn, which dates from the 1980s. It includes the creation of techniques, grammars and styles for a truly Indian modern dance (sometimes referred to as “new dance”). It is manifest in reconfiguration of ballets based on Bharatanatyam, in explorations merging Indian forms such as yoga and chhau and the martial art of kalaripayyatt, and in experimental fusions of western and Indian dance, mainly outside of India in the United States and Canada, England, Germany, France as well as Japan and Australia. So choreographers, dancers, critics and presenters of new dance are also potential readers of Uday Shankar’s biography, and need to have a sense of how Shankar created and choreographed his ‘new dance for the 30s’, which was seen then as ‘authentic Indian dance’ by Europeans, and many Indians, at least at first.
Thus the history of European and Indian knowledge of India’s dance forms becomes a site of controversy in the biography of Uday Shankar. That is, European experience of ‘oriental dance’, from the often-seen ballets of the Romantic era, present the oriental dancer as a bayadere, related to the odalisque of eastern harems: a veiled, mysterious, sexually unexplored figure, rather more like the sylphs than the tawaifs and devadasis they were. ‘Orientalism’ wasn’t based on subtle or sharp distinctions between the cultures of the East; rather these cultures were grouped together as ‘other’, and seen as dark, mysterious, spiritual, exotic, erotic and altogether enticing. Male dancers from the East were few and far between. As recent writings have suggested, such masculine presences did not fulfill the orientalist strategy of using females as symbols for submission to patriarchy and colonialism, a theme which preoccupied, consciously and subconsciously, much of European arts in the l9th and early 20th centuries.
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