Miss Shanta Rao

The youngest of India’s Dancing Daughters, Kumari Shanta is also the most versatile artiste of them all. She is only sixteen, and is already a talented painter, singer and dancer. While yet fourteen, she began to draw–untaught–delightful delicate figure-studies, and colour them in soft subtle shades; and at fifteen she learnt to sing–untutored–thumris and khyals in good classic style. She took to these arts as a bird takes to its wings. She was born to be an artiste.

Shanta was equally precocious in her school, and, as a pupil, a favourite of all. The youngest Secretary of the Fellowship School Union, she was also the first High School girl to become an office-bearer of the Bombay Students’ Federation. She was well-known too, among her fellow-students, as the best monitor and the most energetic organiser of concerts and outdoor excursions.

Like all child prodigies, she is much of a day-dreamer, and lives in a world of her own. Highly imaginative and romantic, she has dabbled in verses and amateur acting. Tragedies have a tremendous fascination for her, and Greta Garbo is her ideal and inspiration. For a young child, she has a mature mind and an uncanny imagination. Wise as well as clever, she grew into womanhood even before she knew the joys of girlhood.

Her young mind broods over things that seldom interest girls of her age, and her child-heart bears all the pangs and pains of the grown-ups. And yet, she has all the vivacity, geniality and freshness of a growing girl. A maid of moods, she is at times gloomy and forbidding as at other times she is bright and attractive. Hers is a strange psychological nature, a regular "Jekyll and Hyde" character. Shanta is by no means an ordinary girl of the average type; she is a young genius awaiting her unfoldment.

She does not accept her talents as a matter of course. She wants to improve and make the best use of them. Shanta is a great girl for hard work. One of her dance teachers observed:

"She’s the very devil for work, and doesn’t spare either herself or others!" Great as is her capacity for work, greater is her capacity for sleep. The mighty Napoleon is nowhere, compared to this girl, in the matter of sleeping without end.

Even in her physical nature, she presents a paradox. She blows hot and cold at the same time, and is indifferent to the extremes of temperature. She thrives in heat, like a Salamander, and a hundred and five in the shade is just a pleasant day for her! And strangely enough, she loves water, like an Undine, and likes to sport in it all day long. Her ideal "home" is a neat little hut by the side of a foaming river or by the shores of an expansive lake. A strange child with a curious and conflicting psychology!

Shanta is a Saraswat from the Konkan coast, the land of fair earth and fairer women. Women there are on this coast, stately and attractive, like the heroines of Ravi Varma, and like this artist’s pictures, pretty and passable. They lack the charm of the darker Bengali or their copper-coloured cousins of the Cauvery valley.

Charm in woman is something subtler than being merely pretty with perfect features or lighter complexion. Charm is more a matter of the mind and soul than of the eyes, nose and lips.

Shanta has a personality; she is a girl with a distinct charm. With a fair complexion and dark dreamy eyes and dimpled smiles, she has all the glamour of a Garbo without being strikingly beautiful. Half her charm is in her boyish ways and her free and frank manner.

Absolutely unsophisticated, natural and simple in her behaviour, confiding and artless in her affections, Shanta wins your heart, like the guileless smile of an infant. A terribly obstinate, self-willed and dominating girl, she can be as shy and awkward as a new-born calf or as gentle and yielding as a newly-wed bride.

Tall and graceful, lithe and long-limbed, agile and athlete-looking, Shanta is an exotic type of beauty, more Greek than Indian. Even in her mental and moral outlook she is Greek. She prefers the simple things of life and scorns the fineries and fashions of other girls of her age. She loves the open air life of fields and groves, and feels more happy among the rustics in villages than in the company of so-called civilised folk in their gilded homes and crowded cities.

The simple white cotton Greek-like tonic, which she prefers to all the costly silks and georgettes, suits her admirably, and enhances her natural beauty a hundred-fold. Her aesthetic sensitiveness, orderly mind and love of the abstract and, above all, her pantheistic tendencies reveal more of the Greek in her soul than the Hindu.

The only child of middle-class Brahmin parents, she was not brought up in any exceptional circumstances. She had not even the ordinary advantages of wealth or position, and her childhood environments were not even of the average cultured Indian home. Art and beauty did not surround her early life, nor had she opportunities for any cultural contacts. She had no facilities to meet artists, to listen to great Ustads, to witness new and novel dramas or dances. She was brought up in the humblest of homes and in the simplest of ways.

But she had one unique advantage. She had perfect freedom to live her young life, to grow to her full stature. She was not cramped by any orthodoxy or hindered by social conventions. There were no meddling relatives or interfering busy-bodies. Even if there were any, they were shown their proper place. She has an understanding mother, who encourages her in all her dreams and aspirations, and a few friends who watch, with sympathy and pride, her growing genius.

The Kerala Kalamandalam, in the Cochin State, is a premier Dance Institute in South India. It is the dream-child of the Kerala poet, Vallathol, and the pride of his heart. Indian dancers of repute like Uday Shankar, Menaka, Shrimati and others have, at one time or other, either visited it or learnt the art of Kathakali from one of its students. It is situated on the left bank of a perennially flowing mountain river, near Shoranur, and is slowly developing into an international institution, drawing students from far and near. Several American, Dutch, German, Polish, Australian and Javanese dance students have already passed through its portals, and its name is spreading all over the world.

"Ah! You’ve such a perfect body, and you’ll be a Number One dancer soon," were the enthusiastic greetings of the poet as he welcomed Shanta to the Kalamandalam. The rugged rural scenes, the picturesque location of the school, the simplicity of the life there, the friendly feeling of the inmates appealed to her, and she soon settled down to master the difficult art of Kathakali. She picked up her lessons surprisingly quick, and learnt within six months what would have taken lesser-gifted girls a year or more. She became the show-girl of the institution, and the winner of the Cochin Dewan’s Scholarship.

Her Kathakali repertoire includes not only such simple dances like "Kummi" and "Kalkottikali," but the more complicated pieces like "Sari," "Pruppadu," "Nataraja Tandavam," "Ashta Kalasams" and others. Her know1edge of the "Mudras" and her command over some of the intricate foot-work and facial expressions are much more perfect than most of India’s better known dancers. Even such clever exponents of Kathakali as Ragini and Ram Gopal did not stay this length of period nor work so hard and conscientiously as this sixteen-year old Shanta.

A girl with her will, ambition, capacity and talent has assuredly a great future, and it requires no special gift of prophetic vision to foretell what significant role this unkown girl artiste will play in the cultural life of India in coming days! She may well prove to be a worthy successor to the achievements and traditions of a Menaka, a Balasaraswathi or a Vara-lakshmi!