Uday Shankar comes alive in Cannes

A remarkably inventive ballet film made in India in the 1940s, dance legend Uday Shankar’s Kalpana, was on the brink of being lost to posterity when Martin Scorsese, as the head of the World Cinema Foundation, stepped in to salvage it from the mist of time.

Scorsese was putting together his 2011 George Harrison documentary, In the Material World, when sitar maestro Ravi Shankar told him about the only film that his elder brother had ever made and the precarious condition that the print was currently in.

Kalpana, sourced from the National Film Archives of India, was restored in a lab in Bologna, Italy, with financial assistance from Mumbai-based ad filmmaker Shivendra Singh of Dungarpur Films.
The restored print of the two-and-a-half-hour film was screened on Thursday evening here as part of the Cannes Classics section.

In the packed theatre were Uday Shankar’s 93-year-old widow, Amala Shankar, his daughter Mamata Shankar and his daughter-in-law Tanushree Shankar.

For Amala, who played a key on-screen role in Kalpana, it was an emotional moment. “I feel at home in France because it is in Monte Carlo, not far from Cannes, that I first met Uday Shankar as an 11-year-old girl.”

“Today, as I stand before you, it is a special moment in my life. For a girl born in a thatched hut in rural Bengal, being part of an international event of this magnitude is beyond compare,” she said.

The restored print of Kalpana, which tells the story of a talented dancer, Udayan, who wants to set up a cultural centre to help young performers channel their creative energies in the right direction, has a brief preamble in which Scorsese explains how and why WCF got involved in the project.

“Kalpana, which means imagination, is not only a dance film. It is a film that was made in a way that reflects the energy of dance,” the American cinema icon says.

As Amala Shankar pointed out in her introduction to the film, Kalpana addressed issues that are still relevant. It cuts a wide swath, commenting on corporate greed, lopsided development, exploitation of workers, the anomalies of the Indian education system, and the plight of rural migrants trapped in a big city.

In a surreal sequence, a wealthy textile mill owner tells a factory worker: “You not only have to operate a machine; you have to work like a machine.”

Kalpana is understandably replete with dance performances but every single choreographed minute is an integral part of the narrative.

The body movements of the actors, the dialogue delivery and the manner in which Uday Shankar employed the interplay of light and shade to evoke emotions are orchestrated in a way that is both cinematic and balletic.           
Shot in Gemini Studios in Madras, the film took four years to make. Work on Kalpana began after Uday Shankar’s dance academy in Almora closed down in 1942 four years after it was set up. Celebrated Hindi poet wrote the lyrics and novelist Amritlal Nagar penned the dialogues for Kalpana.

As a testimony to an internationally feted dancer’s social and creative vision, Kalpana is an Indian cinema landmark whose importance cannot be over-emphasized. The restoration project was long overdue.