Guru Dutt : A Life In Cinema

Excerpts from Guru Dutt's biography by eminent film scholar Nasreen Munni Kabir 

Guru Dutt won a five-year scholarship of Rs.75 a month to study at the Uday Shankar India Culture Centre in Almora. Uday Shankar's father was a diwan (minister) in the service of the Maharajah of Jhalawar. When he retired, a pension permitted the family to live in Benaras while Uday Shankar moved to London with his father who practiced law but also staged musical productions in the mid-twenties. Uday Shankar had initially wanted to be a painter, and studied at the Royal College of Arts in London; but soon his passion for dance overtook his other interests. He lived in London for ten years, during which period he worked for a while with the celebrated Russian ballerina, Anna Pavlova. In 1929, Uday Shankar returned to India to form a troupe of dancers and musicians whom he took back to Europe to live and perform in Paris. The troupe included his younger brother, Ravi Shankar.

In 1938, Uday Shankar  returned to India to stay, and realised his

dream of opening a cultural centre forperforming arts. Uday Shankar's Centre attracted many talented musicians such as the great Ustad Allaudin Khan together with two promising disciples : his own son, Ali Akbar Khan, and Ravi Shankar, who both spent a short time at Almora. Many talented dancers also worked at the Centre, including Simke from France and Uday Shankar's wife, Amala. Madame Simkie is wellknown in Bombay for havingchoreographed the magnificent dream sequence in Raj Kapoor's Awaara(1951). The style of dancing in this dream sequence is clearly inspired by Uday Shankar's own choreography in his film Kalpana(1948). In Ravi Shankar's autobiography titled My Music, My Life (1969) Ravi Shankar describes his brother's Centre :

Uday Shankar

Uday started this culture center on almost twenty acres of land, and he constructed modern studios for dance, drama and music, with built-in stages, costume rooms, workshops and rehearsal halls. He brought in  the best known gurus of India, among them Shankaran Namboodri, the great Kathakali dancer, from whom Dada (Uday Shankar) received his own dancing training and the only real guru Dada ever had in his life. There were also Kandappan Pillai, one of the notable Bharatanatyam teachers, Manipuri guru Amobi Sinha, and even Allaudin Khan to supervise instrumental music. The center was an ideal combination of the old ashram type of school plus the modern workshop atmosphere one finds in some of the open-air institutions in the West. The teachers and the students were all very close, and Uday , with his magnetism and strong personality. kept the entire complex funtioning.

The Culture Centre attracted students from all over India, and Uday Shankar made sure that it was also possible for students of modest means like Guru Dutt to join. Uday Shankar's main criterion of selection was that a student should be genuinely interested in dance. Many students at Almora became well-known in their own right, and not only in dance but also in other disciplines. 

book : Guru Dutt : A Life In Cinema  by Nasreen Munni Kabir