Uday Shankar

It is a happy augury that decades of anti-nautch activities notwithstanding, the public has veered round to the view that encouragement or appreciation can never be thrown away on an art so forceful and significant as Indian Dance. Attempts at revival like those of Uday Shankar are entirely praiseworthy. Uday Shankar has undoubtedly a fine body and has begun well in trying to revive Dance when he could easily have, with many others, dismissed it as an anachronism; he has revealed uncommon taste and discrimination in his choice of assistants, costume, and jewellery. Some of his sculpturesque poses were not without elements of beauty and the rough vigour of the dance of the elephant-headed Asura with its weird kahala accompaniment was impressive. But let us consider what exactly constitutes Indian Dance in order to appreciate the disabilities and lapses of Uday Shankar, not with a view to damp his ardour but to indicate the possible directions in which he can improve.

Abhinaya literally meant a process of approximation, but was really the art of expression and was of four kinds: the first was expression through costume and jewellery carefully chosen for their effectiveness on the stage; the second was expression through speech, predominantly musical and rich with rhythmic pauses and modulations; the third was expression through gestures and bodily movements–angikabhinaya, gesture-language as we may call it; the fourth was the abhinaya of such involuntary manifestations of emotion like pallor, horripilation, etc. Natya was the coincidence of all these four types of approximation and it was through the medium of natya that the drama was allowed to present itself on the stage, a circumstance that explains the operatic character of the indigenous drama.

That form of Dance that brought out the material and emotional content of a song by the last three modes of abhinaya, but without the aid of costume and ornamentation, was known as nrittya.

Nritta or tandava referred to the dances of Siva–the classical angaharas made up of dance cadences called karanas with their own special vocabulary of gestures and movements –an imaginative dance that rejected the burden of the human spirit and interpreted neither sense nor bhava and recognised no theme or programme other than itself, a thing of beauty and analogue of the raga in which "the end was not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression." Each karana presupposed a rhythmic attitude preceding and following the movement–a disposition of the body in which perfect harmony of limbs was achieved, as when the chest was thrown slightly forward, body flexed graciously and relaxed, and the feet a little parted with hands to correspond. Karana meant the co-ordination of such an attitude in a continuous and seductive movement; the movement in turn resolved itself into a movement of the hands and one of feet. A sequence of these karanas in a prescribed order, and within the limits of tala, formed an angahara.

It will be clear that these dances have an elaborate technique and that nothing is left to chance or the whim of the performer, and that every movement and gesture, from the simplest to the most complex, is predetermined. It was the duty of the dancer to learn and train himself to execute these with grace and fidelity. A dancer could no more guess a movement or gesture or invent his own than a musician could guess or invent raga and tala.

Our knowledge of the subject is derived largely from the Natya Sastra of Bharata and the extensive literature that the art has gathered round itself during the ages. We have, in addition, sculptural texts on natya at Chidambaram and elsewhere, of great help in reconstructing this forgotten art. In South India today, there is the living art of the nautch which embodies the bulk of angikabhinaya–the quintessence of natya, in a purer and more refined form than is to be met with in the other dance traditions like those of Siam, Java, and Cambodia, though to the student of Dance all these parallel systems have precious secrets to unfold, and merit the most careful attention and study. Of less importance from a practical point of view are the general sculpture and painting of early India which do not specifically deal with Dance as at Chidambaram, but which have borrowed dance forms to a great extent, particularly the hastas and attitudes. It must be remembered, however, that where the sculptor or painter was not interpreting Dance, he was privileged to modify such dance forms as he borrowed to suit his own art. While guidance from such a source may be occasionally helpful, it is risky to place absolute reliance on it unless it has been previously compared with natya texts and found to be correct.

It is unfortunate that Uday Shankar has relied too exclusively on this last source viz., general and hieratic sculpture, without attempting to verify them in the manner suggested–a circumstance responsible for the scant success of some of his expositions. Eclecticism is ruinous when applied to traditional forms of Dance. Uday Shankar is at liberty to invent a patois of his own out of gesture materials gathered from the most diverse sources, but when he claims that it is India's classic dance, we may be pardoned if we differ. Barring three or four hastas he has copied from sculpture, his gestures and steps are faulty and his performance does not reveal the requisite acquaintance with abhinaya. In place of the wonderful dance sequences of classic India, Uday Shankar executed all manner of steps accompanied by arbitrary hastas and jerked himself into a posture that he had seen in stone and wanted to recapture, but lacked the knowledge to expand or co-ordinate it in a movement. Uday Shankar is clearly not aware that the tandava of the bronze Nataraja is the sculptor's version of the dance and that the dancer's version is different, and that even trained Devadasis cannot hope to attempt such difficult cadences without long and arduous preparation and rehearsals innumerable.

It is more pleasing to dwell on the possibilities, were Uday Shankar to stay in India for a few years and put himself to systematic training under a master like Narayanaswamy Iyer of Nallur and assimilate everything that the living traditions can impart, and then apply himself to the task of recovering the forgotten dances of ancient India with the aid of texts, literary and sculptural. Then indeed, Uday Shankar will not have striven in vain. In a matter like this, appreciation from the West is not everything, for the public there knows little about the genius and scope of our art forms. Uday Shankar is ambitious, and complete success in the dances he attempts is possible only if he equips himself with a thorough knowledge of the art.