ABSTRACT
Shankarscope was Shankar’s last masterpiece. Once Shankar returned to India after the tour of 1968, he spent a few months in recuperation. However, towards the beginning of 1970, he sent word to a few of his close associates that he wanted to embark on a new production. In the souvenir of Shankarscope in 1970, Shankar writes that he had been thinking of this multimedia production for almost 20 years but had been unable to take it on due to financial constraints. With Ranjit Mull Kankaria as the producer, this final production of Shankar’s which used both the stage and the screen concurrently, was technologically way ahead of its time, and the first time that such an experiment was undertaken in India. It introduced to India technical innovations which had not been previously used, while the content mirrored some of the socio-economic–political challenges India faced in the 1960s and 1970s. It posed pertinent questions, and even critiqued various aspects of Indian society. The themes varied from that of unemployment, to the then current trend of Bollywood movies, to questioning what comprises true beauty. The 1971 production of Shankarscope also witnessed the inclusion of the item Chinna Bichinna, based on the havoc created by West Pakistan in East Pakistan and the genocide that followed, prior to its war of liberation. This chapter details the items performed, the stories they told, how they were performed, the technology used, the music recordings and the re-staging of it in 1971 and 1972. In the 1972 restaging, a one-hour reworked version of Samanya Kshati was also staged with Shanti Bose as the Assistant Director, and in the lead role of the King, which Shankar himself used to portray previously. Bose was also still the Ballet Master for Shankar’s troupe. Details of this production have not been recorded in any of the existing literature on Shankar.
