Confiding in her strength

Eighty-two-year-old Amala Shankar is to tour the West soon with a travelling exhibition to mark her husband and dance legend Uday Shankar's birth centenary. She talks about her past to LEELA VENKATRAMAN.

SEATED in the modest living room of a home in Delhi's Jangpura Extension, 82-year-old Amala Shankar takes a walk down memory lane - and memories when you have been the wife of a legend like Uday Shankar, are overpoweringly strong. Dressed in elegant simplicity, in a plain tussar sari with rudraksha beads round her neck, her forehead marked by a vivid ash tilak, the face mapped with the lines of great joy and haunting sorrow which life has dealt her equally, Amala exudes the peace of one who has come to terms with life. She is all set to leave on a long tour of Paris, London and the United States with a travelling exhibition, conceived by Dr. Sunil Kothari under the sponsorship of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, comprising clippings from the film "Kalpana" and rare photographs of the late Uday Shankar, to mark the dance phenomenon's birth centenary.

Amala talks about her past candidly

Three score and 10 years ago, as a starry eyed 11-year-old, Amala was first exposed to the magic of Uday Shankar transforming from king to beggar to god to magician on a stage in Paris, while on a visit with her father. Later, when she happened to meet him, she recollects her amazement at the fact that this demigod moved and spoke like any other mortal.

To be a dancer was farthest from Amala's thoughts, when Uday Shankar, then 30 years old, casually asked her to copy an ordinary step he demonstrated, and to twirl a stick in the air. On seeing her do what was asked, the maestro remarked, "You will be a dancer." Amala could have been knocked down by a feather, so surprised was she. Gradually she started spending days with the master learning. When he was out on tours, she stayed with his mother who was her guardian. After she had completed her studies, which an orthodox father insisted on as the minimum qualification, it was suggested by Subhash Chandra Bose, who had seen her dance, that she spend a few months at Almora at the centre Uday Shankar had stated.

When Amala was still in her teens, her idea of love was to be spirited away by an Arjuna, a Kartikeya or a Krishna, mythological heroes who had eloped with Subhadra, Valli and Rukmini respectively. One day she happened to see Uday Shankar dance as Kartikeya. "I knew that I had met the love of my life. But I carried the secret within me for years and not till December 8, 1939 (by then she was all of 23 years old) did I get a knock on my door at night in Almora. Surprised to see Uday Shankar, I offered him a chair while I sat on my bed. 'I have decided to get married,' he announced. Dying a thousand deaths inside, I calmly responded, 'I am happy.' 'Are you not going to ask me the name of my intended bride?' he asked. I looked perplexed and then he announced, 'Her name is Amala.' I gave a gasp and burst out sobbing - sometimes happiness cannot be contained in words.

"I now know that he had been testing me for months trying to see if I was the right wife for him. He was after all a dance Adonis, with women all over the world swooning over him and wanting to give him anything he asked for."

I ask her gently if she ever had the feeling of inadequacy and of not measuring up to his standards.

"Never. I once asked him as to why he had selected a dark plain Jane like me, when he could have had any beautiful woman he wanted. His answer was 'I have tasted the water of many springs. I recognise Ganga jal when I see it.'"

One soon realises that there is more to Amala than meets the eye. She is an extremely well read woman and very much her own person. "I have read every bit of the literature of Tagore and of Bengal. My father insisted on that. I often helped Uday with a selection of sequences from literature for preparing the libretto. In the Ram Lila shadow play, I located the sequences best situated for this kind of treatment. In the production, he was not happy with the slide projection for the light on the glass created an effect, which he did not want. I as a thumb/nail painter - I do not use brushes - provided the requisite shading effect, superimposing a sketched tree and he was very happy. Similarly for the Buddha production, my paintings were used. He would laugh, 'Here I am, with a first class degree in painting from a school in Paris, and here is an untutored painter like you telling me what to do.' He had always stubbornly insisted that he would never make Buddha dance and that the subject was unsuitable as a theme for dance. I convinced him about the details of Gautama's earlier life as Siddharta spent with Yashodhara amidst courtly splendour, as being ideal for dance and he changed his mind. He had great respect for my dancing too. Yes. We were true partners."

Amala shows me the 30 odd paintings she has just completed for an exhibition. The muted images, like the reflection of something in water, have a power of suggestion, much beyond the doodles of an amateur. There is character in the work.

"I am a painter by instinct. I have no training."

One can see that the love she cherished for her husband was not blind. "I was brought up in a comfortable, but not rich, home, where chores were done by the family members with no domestic help. It was far from the comfort loving high society Uday moved in. My father and Uday - I loved them both deeply - were opposites, like night and day. But both shared a love for discipline. Some things in Uday, I did not agree with. But there was a simple side to him that I loved. Once the Digantar journalist who had visited us wrote about how wonderful it was to see Uday operating the hand pump to let water flow from the pipe as my mother washed the utensils."

Amala believes that it is this essential simplicity which attracted Uday Shankar to Pavlova who also was unspoilt. "She was so natural. Her dance of the 'Dying Swan', a creation of her own, could never be equalled, though many tried. It was she who made Uday look for his own dance in India. While working with her, my husband was a highly paid artiste and he begged her to be allowed to dance like her. Her answer was, 'Not even one step - you will have no place here if you do western dance. Go and find out why such a great culture has reduced its dance to just the nautch.' And indeed what my husband did was rooted in the Indian experience, though he borrowed the showmanship from the West."

Talking about Uday Shankar's phenomenal talent, Amala recollects some details. "Things appeared to him in a flash - like that!" with a snap of the fingers. "He was never one to take hours working out a dance drama. He was like lightning on the stage. I have heard people say that when he did Siva Tandav dance - and mind you he used no big rhythmic flashes - the entire auditorium space seemed to dance with him. Such was the power of the dance. People all over the world would ask for the Dance of Indra. I do not know why. For me, it was not his best work. But I realised later how like the bud opening out into a flower, he made movement blossom out so smoothly. He was great at that."

Amala talks about great artists like Timir Baran and Lalmani Misra who worked with Uday Shankar for years. She speaks of the likes of Shanti Bardhan and Prabhat Ganguly his disciples, who spread along with him, the message of Indian Modern Dance. She remembers Simkie - Uday Shankar's dance partner for a long time. Suddenly her mind goes back to the show mounted as a farewell for Dharamveera, when Simkie fell ill and she was asked to take her place, after furious rehearsals. Zora Segal now, told me right then, "Uday seems to be getting very fond of you." Ours was a marriage where we shared everything. Of course people gossiped about Simkie who incidentally was loved by my mother and was also my friend. I still have a whole bunch of letters she wrote to me. I do not bother about wagging tongues. When Uday and I married, both our children, Mamu (Mamata) and Ananda grew up amidst the smell of dressing rooms and grease paint. Our eyes just had to meet once in a Siva Parvati duet across the stage in a silent message of what we meant to each other. Nobody could possess Uday Shankar. I knew this and I expected nothing. But our bond was special."

Before I can ask her about the last days of Uday Shankar spent in single and cloistered isolation, Amala herself broaches the subject. "With all the love we shared, he chose to live separately in the last few years."

"Why?"

"He began to mourn the fact that he was no longer the young charmer with the world at his feet and screaming fans following him. I am now above 80 - sustained by all the love and adoration given by audiences in the past, though to tell you the truth when audiences clapped too much, I would go to the dressing room and cry. It was too much for me. I cannot be the heroine of 'Shamnya kshoti' now. So what? That hardly bothers me. There was the vulnerable side to Uday that some people preyed on and they brought about a rift and ugly stories were spread. I remember ringing him up on our wedding anniversary and telling him that I had prayed to God that he would be my husband in every life I had. I had a dream which my family and the children knew about - of our suddenly accosting each other in a narrow corridor and of his slowly drawing my head on to his left shoulder and gently planting a kiss on it. A few days before he died, I went to see him in the nursing home and he said that he felt that 'his roots had been covered by too many weeds, which he wanted to pull out'. As I came out of the bathroom, he called me and drawing me slowly to his side, put my head on his shoulder and said 'Thank you. Thank you for every thing darling' and gently kissed me. Mamu, who dances and is also a well known film actress, almost had goose pimples seeing dream turning into reality. He was never happy alone - but chose to live so - or was made to choose!"

There is no weepy querulousness, only slight regret in her voice. She talks of her more recent sorrow - the death at a fairly young age of her son Ananda. She remembers how in an old time aristocratic hotel in Moscow, where the Shankars were staying during a visit prompted by Jawaharlal Nehru to take part in the 50th anniversary of Bolshoi Theatre, little Ananda playing the piano in their suite. Uday Shankar observed that the boy had an uncanny ear for music. When older, the boy refused to be constantly compared with the father. "I cannot live up to a legend. I want to be a musician."

Refusing admission in New York's Juliet School of Music, because he wanted to study Indian music, Ananda made a fine career for himself as a composer. "People call his music simplistically a fusion of the east and west. It was much more. When he lay ill in hospital, I was with Sai Baba. When my daughter rang me up to say all was over, I kept asking 'All over?' But I did not cry. 'You must face life and go to say your last goodbyes to your son. Nobody need accompany for I will be with you,' said Baba. I had the feeling of a cocoon protecting me from hurt and I became another person watching from the outside this woman who was going to see her son's body. My most priced possession is gone. But I have a feeling, he is merged with a truth, I too will be a part of. My daughter-in-law Tanushree carries on bravely."

Amala has turned into a fine speaker, and what she says from the heart strikes a chord in every listener. She danced for a few minutes and I was amazed at the agility and grace of her body even at this age. The face may show age but not the body. "I will dance till I am 90," she says fervently. "I must have done some great good to have been given the chance of sharing the life of such a legend and to have had the love of so many people. I ask nothing more of life. On Uday's 100th birthday, I wish to remind people of his great dance message."

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : From canvas to film
Next     : Karan or Kumbhakaran?