Amala Shankar - The Unconfined Indian Danseuse
Amala Shankar, the legendary artist of Indian dance has passed away in Kolkata at the age of 101 on Friday.
Last month, she celebrated her 101st birthday. Then, less than a month later, the news of her death came in. The late artist's granddaughter Shreenanda Shankar shared the news on her social media page. Posting several pictures of her with Amala Shankar, Shreenanda wrote:
“Grandma left us today at the age of 101. I celebrated her birthday last month. There are no flights from Mumbai to Kolkata, so it feels very restless. The mind is broken. I wish her peace of mind. A chapter concludes. Love you Thamma. Thank you for everything.”
She was the wife of the late dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar and mother of the late musician Ananda Shankar and acclaimed actress Mamata Shankar and sister-in-law of musician and composer Ravi Shankar, who had died in 2012.
Amala Shankar's performance as Umar in Kalpana, directed by Uday Shankar, caught everyone's attention and was also acclaimed at the Cannes Film Festival.
Within a few days, she became one of the most famous dancers in the world. The cloud of extreme sadness has descended on the dance world of Bengal with the demise of the proverbial dancer Amala Shankar. Many mourned her death and wished her peace of mind.
Amala learned to dance during the 1930s, when women from “respectable households” were just about beginning to perform classical dance on stage.
Rukmini Devi Arundale, the architect of Bharatanatyam as we know today, held her first public performance in 1935 and set up the Kalakshetra in 1936.
“If Udayji will be remembered as a pioneer who took Indian dance to a global platform, Amalaji will be remembered as the woman who stood by him, danced next to him, and took his style forward after his death,” says 88-year-old Vijay Kichlu, musician, a close associate of the Shankar family and founder of Kolkata’s famed ITC Academy.
Amala and Uday Shankar
In 1930, Amala’s father, Akshay Kumar Nandy, a gold trader, was invited to represent India at the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris to showcase India’s craftsmanship in gold. Of his six children, he surprisingly took 11-year-old Amala along. She was bright, a sports champion in school, and “the most receptive of the six children”, says Mamata.
In Paris, they met the Shankar family- Uday and his three brothers, including the youngest, Robu (Pandit Ravi Shankar). While the brothers wowed Parisian audiences with their performances, their mother Hemangini Devi would cook and keep the house.
Uday, much older, was already feted in global dance circles. After studying at the JJ School of Art in Mumbai, he had moved to London to study painting at the Royal College of Art. There, he choreographed two ballads titled Krishna and Radha and A Hindu Wedding in 1923. During one of these performances, he was spotted by Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, who chose to partner with Uday for a year to present a slew of performances together in London and Paris.
While the legendary famous dancer that was Uday, Amala became synonymous with the Kalakendra, where she took on the hard work of disseminating his legacy to a new generation of dancers. She valued his unique style, the blend of so many art forms, and worked to ensure that “it wasn’t lost”.
Ananda Shankar is the first child of Uday Shankar and Amala Shankar. And daughter Mamata Shankar was born in January 1955. Uday Shankar passed away in 1986. Later, daughter Mamata Shankar and daughter-in-law Tanushree Shankar continued the dance tradition in their family. Even today, many students are following the path shown by them.
Mamata remembers her mother speaking of a Durga Puja celebration in Almora, when Kathakali maestro Shankaran Namboodri chanted the shlokas, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan played the dhaak while Amala, Zohra and Uzra had prepared the prasad.
In this environment, Amala, 20 by then, blossomed. She was tall, nimble on her feet, and was slowly finding appreciation for her expression - one of the mainstays of the Uday Shankar style.
He taught with Zohra or Simkey by his side, while she was an attentive student.
“Ma has always talked fondly of this period of her life. It was a different world. She was around Baba in a beautiful environment. But she was there to train and concentrated on learning. I have been able to understand Simkey and Zohraji’s style because Ma showed me. She watched, very carefully, the way they moved,” says Mamata. Amala also learned Manipuri classical dance from Amoubi Singh, Kathakali from Nambudiri, and Bharatanatyam under Kandappa Pillai.
The ‘Kalpana’ Project
At first, he named his dream project, ‘Imagination’. But Amala wasn’t convinced about an English name for a film in Hindi. “She changed it to Kalpana,” says Mamata. “Baba agreed. He wasn’t only her teacher and husband. He had immense respect for her as an artiste and was receptive to her ideas.”
Kalpana tanked as soon as it was released in 1948, a year when competing films included Dev Anand and Kamini Kaushal’s Ziddi and Mela, which featured Dilip Kumar and Nargis.
“India’s failure to recognise Kalpana was extremely sad. Uday Shankar’s only film was like a painting, a criticism of Indian life,” says Shankarlal Bhattacharya about the film that Satyajit Ray is rumoured to have watched 11 times.
Despite its box-office destiny, Kalpana’s dance sequences were talked about for years to come. Be it the Bharatanatyam-inspired Tandav nritya, with Uday and Amala as Shiva and Parvati, or Amala’s spunky Bhil folk dance, and the climax, where she heads a group of women on stage, who have rejected saris to stomp out in kurtas and churidars, dupattas be damned.
The lyrics of the film were penned by poet Sumitranandan Pant. “If Udayji conceived these pieces, she executed them beautifully. In many ways, she was the Kalpana he had in mind,” says Kichlu. Besides being brilliant in the language she learned from Uday, she was equally at home with the classical and the avant-garde. Most dances in Kalpana are a blend of various Indian classical dance forms, folk and western ballet. “You will find her comfortable in every kind of piece she delivered,” says Mamata.
The Shiva-Parvati piece, especially, has found a mention in almost every book written on Indian dance ever since. Uday depicts the cosmic cycle of creation and destruction with his vigorous, brisk movements, and the famed hasta mudra. Amala, who plays Shiva’s feminine counterpart, responds with lasya, the dance of aesthetic delight that symbolises eroticism through delicate, subtle and graceful movements. Together, the two create a riveting performance. “But we always tend to notice Shiva more than Parvati. He is handsome, virile, masculine and a serious performer. She is beautiful, too, but in a complementing role. That’s why one notices Udayji more than Amalaji in this performance. She, however, is the backbone here. Shiva is incomplete without Shakti. The latter is the shadow here but equally significant,” says Reddy.
Amala remained the cornerstone of the Shankar family. While Uday was the creative genius, she was the administrator. She planned the costumes, rehearsed his choreographies with the dancers and took care of the tiniest aspects on tour. When she wasn’t touring, she taught extensively. “A strict mother but a gentle teacher, she was as particular about how one had to wear a bindi, as about how the sari needed to be tied and how the capsicum needed to chopped. She has always wanted things a certain way and that’s what was drilled into Ananda and her students and me. You couldn’t take a short cut,” says Mamata.
The two separated a few years before Uday’s death in 1977.
The restored print of ‘Kalpana’, which was screened at the festival’s Cannes Classic Section in 2012, the then 93-year-old star, arrived at the event saying:
“I am the youngest film star in Cannes”. The film had been brought to life after four years of concerted efforts. It was Uday’s brother, renowned sitarist Pandit Ravi Shankar, who had got in touch with Martin Scorcese’s World Cinema Foundation for support and funds.
The centenarian, who had been active even in her early 90s, was awarded Banga Vibhushan by the Bengal government in 2011 for her contributions in the field of art. In 2012, she received Sangeet Natak Akademi Tagore Ratna award for her contribution to dance.
In 1965, Uday had set up the centre in Kolkata, with Amala as the director. Over the next 50 years, she taught a number of students, many of whom became noted dancers. One of them was Tanushree Shankar, who later married her son and composer Ananda Shankar.
To Mamata and many of her students, she was a perfectionist. Among many of Amala’s students is Anuradha Lohia, now the vice-chancellor of Presidency College. “It’s not just dance, she taught me conduct, patience, and strength. Only a great teacher can inculcate value systems alongside an art form and she did exactly that,” she said.
But with the death of this famous dancer which is an irreparable loss to the dance world; went away the end of an era, an anecdote of a chapter: that was beautiful and drunken in an enchanting world!
Rest in Peace Amala Shankar.
