Introduction

This introductory segment traces Uday Shankar’s life from his birth in 1900 in the city of Udaipur, till the late 1950s, and the various socio-cultural and economic influences on him. This chapter is more in the form of a biography and traces the trajectory of his life from his childhood days divided between Udaipur and Nasrathpur (which was his maternal grandfather’s home), to being a student at the J.J. College of Arts in Mumbai, then a student at the Royal College of Arts in London, his interaction with Sir William Rothenstein and Anna Pavlova, and the subsequent transition from a painter to a dancer and choreographer. It also highlights his performances and choreography during this period, as well as the various people he came into contact with, who influenced him and his work immensely. It also looks at Shankar’s return to India in the early 1940s, after having spent almost two decades in the West, the setting up of the Uday Shankar India Culture Centre at Almora, the socio-political as well as economic conditions both in India and the global order at the time, the move to Madras and the creation of Kalpana, and then finally the move to Kolkata. This chapter explores the transition in his compositions from being based on mythology and reflecting exotic India in the initial years, to mirroring and questioning the socio-economic, religious and political order of modern India, which is reflected in his film released in 1948, Kalpana. Given the fact that the period and content of this chapter is beyond the focus of the main study, this chapter is more of a dawn-to-dusk narrative based essentially on secondary literature review, which sets the background for a detailed analysis of Shankar’s work in the autumn years of his life. It has been written primarily on the basis of review of the existing literature on Uday Shankar and Shankar’s write-ups in the various souvenirs of the period 1960–1977, a televised interview of Shankar by the theatre personality Shambhu Mitra – where Shankar talks of his life and what influenced him.