Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 4

Kalpana: Dreaming the Impossible Dream

Essays—

Sep 28, 2022

For decades, modern-dance pioneer Uday Shankar’s one and only film, the radical Kalpana, was locked away in the National Film Archive of India because of a copyright dispute. “A dance fantasy in celluloid,” as the posters for the film on its 1948 release boldly stated, it features hyperstylized cinematography, spectacular dance sequences, and a layered, melodramatic narrative that warns the Indian film industry and the newly independent nation itself of the perils of pursuing commerce over culture. Kalpana should have been an inspirational classic of postcolonial Indian cinema for generations of artists, academics, filmmakers, dancers, and cinephiles. But this was not to be. Needless to say, such erasures forever alter history, and it is only over seventy years later that we can discover in Kalpana a truly modern cinematic form, created by an artist who was well ahead of his time, and a manifesto for a secular, democratic-socialist India that could have been.

Kalpana, a Sanskrit word, has multiple meanings in English. “Imagination,” “fantasy,” “desire,” “idea,” “decree,” “myth,” and “dream” are some of its translations, and all of those concepts are fully embodied in Shankar’s cinematic landscape. Constructed as a film within a film, a dream within a dream, Kalpana is framed by a story about a desperate director, played by Shankar himself, who attempts to convince a greedy, box-office-obsessed producer to finance his film. As he begins to narrate his script, a cloud of smoke takes us into Shankar’s semi-autobiographical tale.

The first scenes are of a playful, naughty young boy who loves to don female costumes to perform onstage and also enjoys painting—offering glimpses into Shankar’s own childhood. A dramatic plot of twists and turns ensues. Episodes of murder, unrequited love, catfights, betrayal, and intrigue are structured around spellbinding dance performances by Shankar, as the story’s hero (Udayan); his wife, Amala Uday Shankar, who plays the heroine (Uma); and their splendid troupe of dancers, all of whom were trained by Uday Shankar to perform for the camera. As Udayan battles multiple obstacles toward fulfilling his dream of building a national art school, the film mirrors Shankar’s own struggles in setting up a cultural and educational institution in the foothills of the Himalayas. In 1939, with India’s independence on the horizon, he had garnered funding to build the Uday Shankar India Cultural Centre in Almora. With an experimental pedagogy aimed at nurturing the emerging cultural identity of a new India, the institution flourished until 1943, when it was forced to shut down mainly because of financial difficulties. This experience had a profound impact on Shankar, and in 1944, with his enduring belief in modern art forms, he began the four-year journey of making Kalpana.

Shankar had been encouraged to learn painting and dance by his parents. After studying at the Sir J. J. School of Art in Mumbai, he went in 1920 to the Royal College of Art in London, where he was mentored by Sir William Rothenstein, a renowned painter, art historian, and connoisseur of Indian art. Being from an upper-caste Bengali family and thus an elite colonial subject, Shankar had gravitated toward learning Western art practices. But on Rothenstein’s insistence, he began studying classical Indian art at the British Museum. It was this exposure to the rock sculptures of the Ellora cave temples, the Buddhist paintings at Ajanta, and Mughal miniature paintings that would inspire the extraordinary forms of the still and moving divine bodies in Shankar’s iconic dances and choreography.

While in London, Shankar performed his own, improvised form of Indian dance for a cultural elite. During this time, he encountered Anna Pavlova, the Russian ballerina, who became fascinated by him. She saw in him the potential of extending her experimentation with Western ballet into a new and exotic realm. By 1923, Shankar had choreographed and performed two ballet pieces, Radha Krishna and Hindu Wedding, as part of Pavlova’s Oriental Impressions program, which premiered at the Royal Opera House in London. After touring Europe and America with Pavlova, Shankar moved to Paris in 1924, where he would eventually meet French pianist and dancer Simone Barbier, or Simkie, as he affectionately renamed her and she became widely known. Simkie became his dance partner and rumored love interest, and together they delighted the Western world for several years as avatars of dancing Indian gods and goddesses. Simkie would ultimately move to India to work at the Almora school.

Toward the end of the 1920s, Shankar visited India with his new patron, the Swiss sculptor Alice Boner. They traveled across the country to study various forms of dance, music, and visual arts. He became deeply influenced by the Bengali Renaissance and its leading cultural figures—poet Rabindranath Tagore and his nephew, the painter Abanindranath Tagore. Their teachings were rooted in asserting Indian modernity through Hindu spirituality, anticolonial activism, and a critique of Western materiality. Shankar became very aware of his complicated identity as a transnational artist navigating Western Orientalism and Eastern classicism. This consciousness made him even more committed to developing a progressive, postcolonial Indian aesthetic. He started his own dance company, often billed as Uday Shankar and His Hindu Ballet, with which he traveled the world for almost ten years, becoming an international sensation. Accompanying him as a young dancer and musician was his younger brother Ravi Shankar, who was ten years old when he traveled from India to Paris to be part of Uday’s original troupe. The complex orchestral instrumentation in his older brother’s performances had a profound impact on young Ravi. He began to learn the sitar and later became the icon of Indian classical music we know now.

At the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931, eleven-year-old Amala Nandy saw Shankar dance for the first time. Mesmerized by him, she decided to learn dance and joined his troupe. They traveled the world together for nearly a decade and were married in 1942. Their personal chemistry is evident in Kalpana, especially in the shimmering performance of the dance sequence “Shiva Parvati,” which transports the film into the realm of science fiction.

Uday Shankar was a self-taught dancer. His practice was purely experimental. Much like his contemporaries Martha Graham and Mary Wigman, he challenged traditional forms to create his own. He confidently mixed idioms of Indian classical dance such as Kathakali, Bharatanatyam, and Odissi with local Rajasthani folk dance and Western ballet to reimagine some of the great Indian mythological tales. His influences ranged from Ananda Coomaraswamy’s The Mirror of Gesture, an English translation of the Abhinaya Darpana, a classical text on the dramatic arts, to German expressionism and the work of modern dancers Sigurd Leeder and Kurt Jooss. Shankar’s extensive training in the visual arts, along with an understanding of the Western proscenium space, gave him the ability to seamlessly combine art forms of the East and the West to create an entirely avant-garde form of dance theater. His craft was not limited to choreographing physical movement in time and space set to rhythmic music but extended into costume and set design, and the composition of cinematic images with dramatic lighting. Kalpana remains the only extensive documentation of Shankar’s highly sophisticated skills across mediums and materials, on both the stage and the screen.

The first and most extraordinarily visualized dance sequences in Kalpana, in which taal, or rhythm, is explained through a dream, are a magnificent feat of optical effects. The exquisite Amala, as Uma, appears like an apsara, a celestial dancer inhabiting the heavens, and introduces Shankar’s dance technique alongside musical instruments—sarod, sitar, flute, xylophone, tablas. What follows is a feast of surreal imagery and tricks with scale and lighting. Udayan’s arm fills the screen, making a wavelike movement. His curving palm creates a gesture that flows from the fingertips to the wrist. And then, like magic, as the palm fills the bottom half of the frame, in the top half, the mridanga drum matches the beats and movement, and dramatic heads and eyes follow the dancing fingertips below in awe. Udayan and Uma begin to dance together in chiaroscuro lighting, moving their arms, heads, torsos, and legs, with minimal footwork. These very particular, very simple yet highly complex abstracted physical movements evolve into a joyous dance that is suddenly interrupted by ominous drumbeats, as the sages in heaven proclaim, “This is Taal, on whose beats the entire world revolves. They transmit life force to the universe.”

The film experiments with an astonishing array of techniques, which both propel the narrative and interrupt it. Each dance sequence is a short experimental piece in itself. These dreamlike, mesmerizing cinematic moments were meticulously composed and edited to create a hypnotic experience, leaving the audience suspended in space and time. Like Shankar’s fellow dancer and filmmaker Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), Kalpana evokes the supernatural and the otherworldly by expanding the film medium into new and uncharted realms. The beauty of the body in motion and the fragility and grace of gesture find resonance in the energy of moving images.

In many ways, just as Deren was laying the foundation for the avant-garde movement in the U.S., Shankar was doing the same in India. His visionary ability to reconcile Indian tradition with modernity had a significant impact across the visual arts, dance, music, and cinema in India. Formally, Kalpana was nothing like other films that were being produced in the country at the time. Its melodramatic narrative with long, hallucinatory interludes of song and dance, experimental music with Indian instruments, ethnographic footage of Indigenous dancers, and stilted, overdramatic dialogue about a great Indian socialist utopia were extremely challenging for contemporary audiences. Kalpana ran for close to six months in the cinemas of Kolkata but was not a box-office hit and received negative reviews from conservative critics. It was, however, celebrated by Satyajit Ray, who apparently watched it sixteen times.

Despite the rather cold reception in India, Kalpana set the tone for many cinematic dance spectacles that followed, including the epic performance of synchronized dancers on giant drums in S. S. Vasan’s Chandralekha (1948), which was also shot at Gemini Studios in Chennai by Kalpana’s brilliant cinematographer, K. Ramnoth. Shankar’s dance idiom inspired B. Hiralal and A. K. Chopra, who were known for their larger-than-life choreography for South Indian Tamil films. His influence is also seen in the dreamlike musical sequence in Raj Kapoor’s Awaara (1951), the several dance performances and Thai-inspired “Oriental” costumes in V. Shantaram’s Jhanak jhanak payal baaje (1955), and in many musicals in the Indian film industry thereafter. And yet, being an initial commercial failure, Kalpana was not further distributed, and was soon forgotten. A disillusioned Shankar never made another film.

Still, the dance forms that Kalpana enshrined, and Shankar’s international visibility as a dancer and choreographer, had an immense impact in the world of dance, revalorizing Indian classical traditions and kick-starting a renaissance in India. He set the stage, to a great extent, for the pathbreaking dancers Rukmini Devi Arundale and Balasaraswati, who popularized the classical form of Bharatanatyam both in India and abroad. Over time, his own syncretic style began to face criticism from conservative, upper-caste cultural gatekeepers for being an impure pastiche. As those kinds of voices came to control the discourse and infrastructure around dance in India, Shankar was increasingly disparaged for not sticking to the rules, and not being authentic or classical enough. In Kalpana’s glorious spring dance festival fundraiser for the cultural center, Shankar takes on his critics quite directly. He asserts his critique of high art and of casteist notions of purity by presenting stunning showcases of tribal and folk music from regions across the subcontinent. He stages these side by side with classical dance forms, so as to advocate for diversity and equality of aesthetic value. He points to how crucial this coming together and doing away with hierarchy, both in Indian society and in the arts, are to building the ideas that will underpin the new nation. This sequence is filled with satirical moments in which rich aristocrats, noblemen, and upper castes are ridiculed for their ignorance and their inability to understand their “subjects.” As he mocks the wealthy for their love of money, the audience is reminded of Shankar’s statement in the rolling opening titles—“I do not deliberately aim my criticism at any particular group of people or institutions, but if it appears so, it just happens to be so, that is all. It is my duty as an artist to be fully alive to all conditions of life and thought relating to our country and present it truthfully with all the faults and merits, through the medium of my art.”

Shankar was associated with the radical Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), founded in Mumbai in 1943. IPTA was at the time an antifascist, anti-imperialist, avant-garde cultural organization and movement, rooted in communist ideology. In the early years of India’s independence, progressive artists from across the country engaged with IPTA’s philosophy of celebrating folk cultural practices and traditions. These initiatives generated a collective spirit of experimentation, while fighting against industrialization and for workers’ rights and labor movements. In a critical scene in Kalpana, where Udayan meets with potential patrons, his anger at their self-righteous and corrupt ways is reflected in a breathtaking reverie that presents parts of Shankar’s most celebrated ballet, Labour and Machinery. Inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), with costumes reminiscent of Oskar Schlemmer’s designs for his Bauhaus ballets, this sequence epitomizes many of the ideas that the IPTA community was espousing. As the factory owner announces “You don’t have to operate the machine; you have to work like a machine,” the dancers’ bodies take on the forms of machines, performing abstracted, repetitive, rhythmic movements against a dark, operatic soundtrack.

Shankar was awarded several state honors in his lifetime, but he died in 1977 an embittered man. He remained a marginalized figure in the Indian dance community and never received as much adulation in India as he did in Europe. Amala Shankar continued his legacy through the Udayan Dance Company in Kolkata until she died in 2020, at the age of 101. Mamata Shankar, their daughter, still runs the institution, where she teaches her father’s dance techniques. Their son, sitar player Ananda Shankar, followed in the footsteps of his father and uncle to become a globally recognized musician.

Kalpana is a feast for the eyes. Soul-stirring, visionary, and melancholic, this dance spectacle ends on a poetic note that, sadly, resonates with the current climate in India. As capitalist forces, right-wing ideology, and antisecular and antidemocratic policies have taken root, India has traveled very far from the socialist utopia that Shankar envisioned. In Kalpana’s tragic final scene, the director (the aged Shankar of the framing story), is thrown out onto the streets by the producer who rejects his script. He stands under a lamppost in a crowded bazaar. In this high-angle shot, he looks up into the camera, his face lit dramatically, and cries out to us:

Beneath this light, I am standing in darkness. This bazaar of joy and happiness is drowning out the voice of my soul. My country is drowning. The world is drowning.

Humanity can’t find a way. God, will this country remain enslaved? Will its people never gain sense? Will they just quietly watch the devastation? For how long will my country sleep? For how long will my kalpana remain just a kalpana?

For us in India today, Uday Shankar’s anguished questions still remain.

Kalpana: Dreaming the Impossible Dream

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