LOOKING BACK
On life with a legend
V.R. DEVIKA
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Veteran Amala Shankar reminisces about how she got into a dancer’s world and her life with the legendary Uday Shankar.
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’While we danced on the stage we would look at each other and smile.’
Full of verve: Amala Shankar (left) with Uday Shankar and daughter Mamata.
I am not a dancer. My life is a dance,” says Amala Uday Shankar. Ninety-year-old, Amala Shankar is bursting with ideas. She plans to visit Almora, at the southern edge of the Kumaon Hills in the summer. If the dance centre started there by her late husband, the legendary Uday Shankar, is revived, she would be happy to teach there every summer. Not just that “I have to write a book to dispel the many misunderstandings about the last days of Uday Shankar,” she says with passion.
“I met him in Paris,” says Amala, still starry-eyed. She was just over 11 years in 1931. Her father had gone to Paris for “Exposition Coloniale” and they heard of some Indian artists performing there. “I was born in a small village now in Bangladesh,” says Amala.
Her father, Akhoy Kumar Nandy, had been very keen that his children should grow up loving Nature and the village. “I would go to the river to get water. As I walked back with the pot on my waist, the wet sari would make a rhythmical noise and I thought I was dancing,” says Amala. She knew no French or English when she accompanied her father to Paris. As she walked on the street, people gazed at her and exclaimed in French at her beauty. “I was shocked, as my mother always lamented that I was too dark.”
Meeting Uday Shankar
At the exhibition, she saw a group of Indian boys. “They were all very handsome,” she says in a whisper, “and very well dressed.” An older boy introduced himself as Uday Shankar and invited her home. He told her that he had a little brother (Ravi Shankar) with whom she might like to play.
When she went with her father, Amala saw Uday Shankar playing basket ball with his brothers. His mother, Hemangini Devi, saw the girl wearing a frock, took her in and dressed her up in her own sari. “Soon she took me in as a daughter, taught me cooking, let me play with Ravi Shankar,” says Amala. “I was mesmerised when I saw Uday Shankar’s dance. Until then I had only seen the jatra in the village. The gandharva dance, the costumes and the musical instruments took me to another world.”
Still bursting with ideas.
Amala began to spend more and more time in Uday Shankar’s house. One day Uday Shankar asked her father’s permission to take her along on a tour. It was a gruelling eight-month tour with performances in 200 cities of 18 countries of Europe; 75 in Germany alone. Amala kept her word to her father who insisted that she write a detailed diary every day. “I had no idea of Uday Shankar’s major contribution to Indian dance then. I only saw how girls loved him and his magnetic personality.”
Her father was reluctant to let her be a dancer. Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, who saw her dance in a friend’s house, asked her father to promise that Amala would be allowed to go to the Almora dance centre for a year. That sealed her fate. She went there absolutely in love. “Uday Shankar tested me in every way possible. I was tested to the limits as a dancer for my skills, as a scholar for my knowledge of mythology and literature and as a woman for the limits of my jealousy …”
The proposal
“In 1939, we were in Madras on a dance tour. December 7 was the eve of Uday Shankar’s birthday. I had retired to my room after the party, and there was a knock on the door. It was Uday Shankar. He came in, sat on a chair and said he had decided to get married. I sighed and said ‘very good’. He asked me if I did not want to know the name and said it is Amala. We kept it a secret and people came to know only in 1941. While we danced on the stage we would look at each other and smile. Life was heaven with all its ups and downs. Our son was born on his father’s birthday, on December 8, just as Uday Shankar had predicted. Mamta came soon after and she was her father’s darling.”
In 1960, Amala received an invitation from a summer school in Colorado in the U.S. to teach the Uday Shankar-style of dance. The school was on a mountain and like a peaceful ashram. Amala was inspired to start a school in Calcutta. The West Bengal government gave space in Rabindra Sarovar. The first class was taken by Uday Shankar.
“I began to teach while Uday Shankar produced ‘Chandalika’ without me. He began to lose confidence. Then he did ‘Shankarscope’ and fell for a girl in his troupe. We began to live separately and some people around him began to take advantage of him. But Mamta and I were by his bedside for the last three days of his life and he cradled my face on his chest and thanked me for everything.”
Still bursting with ideas.
“I have seen many ups and downs; people give me a lot of respect. What I am getting now is what Uday Shankar deserved. Our life together was not just the life of two people but revolved around 40 years of renaissance of Indian dance. In 1981, I got a letter my father wrote to me in 1951. I am glad it took so long or else what was written in it would have left me with a swollen head.”
Amala Shankar recalls an occasion when the Bengali association in New York invited her to deliver the Tagore lecture. Her father had advised her not to prepare too much but to talk spontaneously. “As I stood before the gathering, I became tongue tied. I felt like a giant hand was pushing me into water. Just as my face touched the water, I said, ‘You are trying me are you? I will get through and come up for air.’ And I did. The talk became quite a hit. My life has always been like that and will always be like that,” Amala Shankar says with conviction.
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