(b Udaipur, 8 Dec 1900; d Calcutta, 26 Sept 1977). Indian dancer and choreographer. He was the eldest son of Pandit Shyam Shankar Choudhury and the elder brother of the sitār player and composer Ravi Shankar. He showed a strong interest in the performing and expressive arts during his childhood, performing his own interpretations of the traditional dances of Rajasthan and staging magic shows for his family and friends. In 1918 he began to study art at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay. At the request of his father, who had moved to London in the services of the Maharaja of Jhalawar, Shankar enrolled in the Royal College of Art in London in 1920. Sir William Rothenstein, the Principal of that institution, took an interest in Shankar, advising him to study the Indian paintings housed in the British Museum. Shankar's earlier attraction to dance was nurtured by his growing understanding of the movements he found represented in the artworks which he studied. Soon after graduating in 1923, Shankar was selected by the Russian dancer Anna Pavlova to play Krsna in the Rādhā-Krsna ballet in which she portrayed Rādhā. This role brought Shankar instant celebrity, and he then set out on his own to pursue a career as a dancer. His early tours throughout Europe included concerts in major cities such as Berlin, Vienna and Budapest and featured dances based on Indian themes set to music played on Western instruments. Most of his dance partners during this early period were European women, the most well-known being Simone Barbier, whom Shankar renamed Simkie.
In 1929 the Swiss sculptress Alice Boner funded Shankar's extensive tour of India during which he viewed many of India's works of art in places such as Ajanta, Ellora and Konarak. Shankar established a studio in Calcutta and began the process of ‘authenticating’ his performances with the inclusion of traditional Indian music and musical instruments as well as themes drawn from Hindu mythology and movements from the classical dance traditions of India. He returned to Europe with Simkie, his mother, three brothers and a cousin forming the core of his dance troupe and Timir Baran Bhattacharya, a sarod disciple of the legendary Allauddin Khan, as his music director. On 3 March 1931 Shankar premiered the creative accomplishments of the transformed dance company at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. By the end of 1932, Shankar's troupe had given 369 performances throughout Europe. In the same year the American impresario Sol Hurok brought the troupe to the United States, where Shankar's performances were received enthusiastically.
The next phase in Shankar's career was also initiated with the largesse of a Western benefactor. Leonard Elmhirst of Dartington Hall provided Shankar with the funds needed to establish a Centre for Dance and Music in India, and Shankar also received support from other prestigious individuals such as Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru. The Uttar Pradesh government donated land for the enterprise, and in 1939 the school opened in the Himalayan resort of Almora. Many of the most respected musicians and dancers of India joined its faculty. While overseeing the activities of the school in Almora, Shankar married Amala Nandi, who had joined the troupe in its early days. The Almora school soon ran into financial difficulties and was forced to close in 1944. Shankar resettled in Calcutta and produced a film, Kalpana; initially a financial failure, it was soon recognized for its artistic merits and later won several international awards.
Shankar remained active in creating new ballets in India and in undertaking international tours in the 1950s and 60s. He eventually resettled in Calcutta and once again formed a new dance troupe. On the occasion of Rabindranath Tagore's centenary he produced the ballet Samanya Kshati, based on one of Tagore's poems and with music composed by his brother Ravi. Uday Shankar's health began a severe decline in 1969. After his death, Shankar's children Ananda and Mamata continued their father's creative and experimental approach to dance through new multimedia productions during the 1980s and 90s, but the family tradition suffered a debilitating setback with the death of Ananda in April 1999.
Uday Shankar is remembered for his eclectic approach to dance; he respected and blended together the formalized structures of the various classical dance traditions of India but professed allegiance to none of them. Instead he struck out alone to reinvent the cultural heritage of South Asia by creating a new dance form that sought its inspiration in what he perceived to be the Indian essences of the expression of emotion in movement. Shankar also deserves recognition for having taken numerous Indian musicians to the West; he prepared the way for the internationalization of India's classical music traditions by exposing thousands of Westerners to Indian music and educating many Indian musicians in the ways of the professional show business world of the West.
S. Kothari and M. Khokar, eds.: Uday Shankar (New Delhi, 1983)
R. Abrahams: The Life and Art of Uday Shankar (diss., New York U., 1985)
R. Shankar: Raga-mala: the Autobiography of Ravi Shankar, ed. G. Harrison (New York, 1999)
STEPHEN SLAWEK