Tag: Uday Shankar

Essay

When ‘they’ Danced…

Ratnottama Sengupta is riveted by the phantasmagoric Bhooter Naach, the Ghost Dance, in Satyajit Ray’s legendary film — Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne — that has no precedence nor any sequel in cinema worldwide.

Some years ago, I was preparing for my talk on dance in Hindi Films, given to the Film Appreciation students at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune. I noticed that every major director in the earlier years, from Uday Shankar (Kalpana, 1948), V Shantaram (Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje, 1955), and K Asif (Mughal-e-Azam, 1960), to Guru Dutt (Saheb Bibi Aur Ghulam, 1962), K A Abbas (Pardesi, 1957) and Sohrab Modi (Mirza Ghalib, 1954) had started with Indian classical dance in its purest form – Kathak — and the leading ladies Vyjayanthimala, Waheeda Rahman and Padmini came equipped with the dance of the devadasis, Bharatanatyam. Subsequently however, most filmmakers diluted the purity of these dances, perhaps to suit the situation in their films. And in recent years that dilution has gone further to take the form of fusion dance, westernised dancing, and group dancing to add volume to the glamorous visual of female torsos in movement.

Suddenly it struck me that Satyajit Ray (1921-92) too had used Kathak in its purest form in Jalsaghar (1958) and then ‘diluted’ the purity of classical movements to design the rhythmic footwork of disembodied spirits. And it dawned on me what level of genius could create a dance that becomes a visual statement on the history of the land itself! Of course, I am talking about the ‘Dance of the Ghosts’ in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969). The towering presence had ‘choreographed’ this dance which has simply no parallel in the world of cinema. Yes, the director — who also penned the lyrics besides screenwriting his grandfather’s adventure story first published in Sandesh in 1915 – had diluted the classicism of Kathakali and Manipuri. But he had fused in so many more art forms like masks, paper cutouts, shadow art, pantomime, celluloid negatives and special effects that it emerged as a class in itself, giving even today’s viewers an experience nonpareil.

In this fantasy that ends as a fable with a timeless moral, Ray experimented with a psychedelic burst of dancing. The narrative pivots on a tone-deaf singer and a bumbling drummer. Essentially though Ray’s telling of the ‘fairytale’ was a garbed plea against war. The message he sent out loud and with laughter: “When people have palatable food to fill their belly and music to fill their soul, the world will bid goodbye to wars.”

But Ray’s recounting of the story was far from didactic. Indeed, he himself is known to have said, “I don’t know if you can truly demarcate fantasy and fable.” So, instead of categorising it as one other the other, he recommended that we see Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (GGBB) only as the story of a duo of untalented musicians. Their playing earns ridicule from fellow villagers and contempt from their king but appeals to the upside-down aesthetics of ghosts. The charmed King of Ghosts appears with an eerie twinkling of stars and a disembodied voice to bless them with three boons. With an enjoined clap of their hands, they could feed to their heart’s content, they could travel where they want to in their charmed shoes, and their music could entrance their listeners.

Building upon this children’s story, Ray himself wrote the dialogue, designed the music, the costumes of the entire cast, and the choreography of the Ghost Dance that is redolent of Uday Shankar’s Kalpana. The dead come alive when Goopy-Bagha play and perform a surreal dance that briefly echoes the past of India — because bhoot kaal in Bengali means ‘past tense’.

The celluloid representation depicts in minute details the division of society into caste, class and creed since time turned ‘civilised’. Ghosts in the first group are the royals – from the age of Puranas through Buddha’s times to the rule of Kanishka Gupta. The shadowy, amorphous shapes in the second lot belonged perhaps to the lowest strata of those they ruled – peasants, artisans, Santhals, Bauls, Mussalmans. The third set of ghosts recall the story of colonisation by people who are suited-booted, wear hats, walk with a stick, indigo planters who drink whisky from bottles and strike awe with their body language. The fourth group comprises potbellied ghosts whom Ray identified as ‘Nani Gopals’. They wear costumes that remind us of city-dwelling zamindars, money lenders, padres who try to teach Bible and orthodox priests who run away from them. Their bulky forms contrast the skeletal shadows that precede them on the screen – perhaps because they thrived by exploiting the plebians?

All these ghosts are described later by Goopy and Bagha: they are Baba bhoot Chhana bhoot, Kancha bhoot Paka bhoot Soja bhoot Banka bhoot, Roga bhoot Mota bhoot. Thin or fat, short or tall, crooked or straight, simple or strange… between them, they are the world we inhabit across time and space!

Each group appears separately, in harmony; then they reappear to fight a war and kill one another. The pantomime is danced only to the clash of percussion instruments – and makes us wonder, when did homo-sapiens get so divided?

The allegorical dance in four segments is a phantasmagoria of styles and moods that mesmerises at every repeat viewing – as much by the visuals as by its conceptualisation. But what were the technical feats that shaped the fantastic performance? In an interview given to Karuna Shankar Roy for Kolkata, a magazine edited by Jyotirmoy Dutta, for its special edition on Ray (published on May 2, 1970), the master himself had guided viewers through the Bhooter Naach. Let me retrace part of the journey.

Ray had, since Teen Kanya (Three Daughters, 1961), scored the music for his films as the ustads he earlier collaborated with were too engrossed in their ragas to understand the needs of a film script. In GGBB, in addition to the theme music that has always borne his signature, the songs had to speak, act, develop the characters…

Let me elaborate. The original story simply said Goopy is a singer. But when Ray sat down to write the songs he had to draw upon words, and since words have meaning, the songs “say” something. When Goopy sings to arrest the march of the advancing soldiers, what could the words say? Clearly they couldn’t say, “Dekho re nayan mele jagater bahar! Open your eyes to the wondrous beauty of this earth” – that is the ditty Goopy sings right after being blessed by the King of Ghosts. Set in the calming morning raga Bhairavi, it would not be appropriate here. So he sings, “O re Halla Rajar sena, tora juddha korey korbi ki ta bol! Tell us, oh soldiers of King Halla, what will you achieve through war? You will only sacrifice your life at the altar of weapons!” At once the song becomes a diatribe against wars worldwide and through history.

So, the words are fed by the situation in which the song is being sung – and the movements were stylisation that sometimes leaned towards the Western classical form of Opera and sometimes towards Bengal’s very own Jatra[1]. GGBB is in that sense a complete musical. Yet, I notice that the songs here don’t carry the story forward – instead, they arrest movement. In that sense they can be said to owe their lineage to Jatra where the songs act like the Greek chorus, commenting on the action and acting as the conscience keeper.

Ray did not settle for the obvious, much heard folk songs of Bengal, be it Baul or Bhatiali, Bhawaiya or Gambhira, Kirtan or Shyama Sangeet, Agamani or Patuar Gaan. Nor did he entirely shun the robust classicism of ragas. He crafted his own folksy scheme that was close to the soil of the rustic protagonists yet uncomplicated enough to appeal to the strangers inhabiting the land where they find themselves amid scholastic vocalists. Here, in the distant land where Goopy-Bagha had travelled in their magical shoes, their music had to transcend the barrier of language. In Ray’s own words, “it had to be deshottar, kaalottar[2]”. And in being so, every one of their songs has become timeless. Be it Mora sei bhashatei kori gaan/ We sing the melody of that or any language, or Aay re aay manda mithai/ Rain down on us, sweets for every taste – today they are a part of Bengal’s cultural ethos.

Ray may have caricatured the learned ustads seasoned in ragas but, repeatedly and in various ways, he uses Carnatic music. When Goopy and Bagha are fleeing from the lock-up, the stylised flight parodies Bharatanatyam movement – “Goopy re Bagha re Pala re pala re! Run run run…” Contrast this with the forlorn music of “Dukkho kise hoy? What causes sadness?” The score uses merely two string instruments – a dotara, a two-stringed instrument, and a violin which is widely used in Carnatic music “but here it is played much like the sarinda that is popular in East Bengal,” Ray had explained in the 1970 interview reprinted in Sandesh.

However, I am most fascinated by the use of Carnatic musical instruments in the Ghost Dance at the outset. As in the rest of the film, this sequence too has heavy orchestration — but the movements are choreographed not to a song, only to a quartet of percussion instruments.

At the risk of repeating myself I underscore that Bhooter Naach has no precedent nor any sequel in any movie made in any country at any point of time. So, to understand the process of its creation, we can only listen to Ray. “The story simply said, ‘the ghosts came and danced’. But how could I realise that in visual terms? Bengal of course has a conventional description of ghosts: their ears are like winnows, their teeth stick out like radish, they are pitch-dark, with arched back. But this would not be artistic. Nor could this meagre description sustain me through an entire sequence that had to create an impact deep enough for the film to rest on. Besides, there is no convention about their dancing. That is why I started to think: What if those who actually lived and died, were to come back? How would their bhoot look and behave?”

Here, let me add that for Satyajit Ray as for Upendra Kishore too, the term bhoot was not synonymous with the English ghost or spirit. Indeed, ghosts have been part of our folklore since our forefathers peopled Bengal, so much so that villagers still won’t utter the word after sunset, preferring to refer to them as “They”. In fact, the bhoot always had a different connotation in Bengal’s literary convention that has an entire genre thriving on bhoot-pret-jinn-petni-sakchunni-dainee-Brahmadaitti… Not only is the phantom celebrated in Sanskrit literature’s Betal Panchavimsati, Tagore, talking of his childhood, writes how he expected one of them to stretch out a long arm from the trees after nightfall. Ray’s ‘Lilu Pishi’ – Leela Majumdar – had authored Sab Bhuturey[3], a collection of ghost stories, while Ray himself gave us Baro Bhuter Galpo [4]a fun collection of 12 stories meant to exorcise fear! The tradition continues to live on, through the pen of Sirshendu Mukherjee, author of Nabiganjer Daitya[5], Gosain Baganer Bhoot[6], and Rashmonir Goynar Baksho[7]that was made into a film by Aparna Sen.

Now, to circle back to the Ghost Dance: Once Ray had transformed the ‘positive’ – read, live humans — into their ‘negative’, the dead, he realised that they could be kings and colonists as in history books, and they could be farmers and sepoys, Buddhists and Bauls, preachers and rioters too. After all, there were miles of burial ground in Birbhum — the location where Ray was shooting — that were the resting ground for Europeans who had breathed their last in Bengal. Thus, organically, came the thought of the four categories of ghosts distinctly identified through the visuals: A) the royals; B) the exploited class; C) the firangees or foreign imperialists; D) the bloated exploiters – baniyas or shopkeepers, capitalists, preachers.

In the Kheror Khata, notebooks where he drafted every frame for GGBB, Ray actually names his ghosts. So, Warren Hastings, Robert Clive and Cornwallis are resurrected with their guns and their swords. This reminded me of the Terracotta Soldiers I have seen in Xian: the funerary sculptures depicting the army of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, were modelled on actual lived soldiers, I had learnt. Similarly, the thought of Chatur Varnashram[8]may have led to the four classification of ghosts – and the depiction of rows of simplified human figures on many of our temple walls – including Konark — could have inspired the vertical arrangement of the four groups, one on top of the other.

In execution, these ‘disembodied’ figures were given body by actual dancers. “We spent long hours together choreographing the sequence,” Ray said of Shambhunath Bhattacharya who had trained students in his dance school to take turn in dancing the classical footsteps. Their costumes and make up were, of course, designed by Ray and devised by art director Bansi Chandragupta, in keeping with their station in life. The exception was the Europeans: Ray used shadow puppets dancing 16 frames a second to evoke their mechanised manner. The action was in ‘five movements’: They come, they dance, they clash and war, they build up a frenzy that is resolved in harmony. The ghosts, after all, cannot die again!

Realising the movements was a challenge that the genius overcame technically. “If the four rows had to be physically shot, with four rows of dancers standing one over another, it would have needed a three-storey space. So, we arranged two rows at first, photographed them by masking top half of the film. Then we reversed the film and operated the camera to capture two more rows. The camera was on a crane and at the precise moments marked by music, we had to zoom back from the close up…”

The music for Bhooter Naach has its origin in the Carnatic taal vadya kacheri – an orchestra of percussion instruments that Ray first heard on radio, then witnessed at the inauguration of an International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Delhi. He decided to use a unique quartet comprising of mridangam, ghatam, kanjira and morsing. For the uninitiated: mridangam is a double-sided drum (somewhat like Bengal’s terracotta drum, khol) with a body made from hollowed jackfruit wood and the two mouthpieces covered by stretched goatskin. Ghatam, known as ghara in Punjab and matka in Rajasthan, is a clay pot with a narrow mouth whose pitch varies with its size. Kanjira, belonging to the tambourine family, has a single pair of jingles on it. And morsing, a plucked instrument held in the mouth to make the ‘twang twang’ sound, is also found in Rajasthan and Sindh. Ray used mridangam for the royals “because it is classical,” and their dance movement is also purely classical. Kanjira, with its semi-folk sound, he used for the farmers, and ghatam with its somewhat rigid sound was right for the rather wooden, mechanical movement of the Europeans. And the croaking sound of the morsing? Yes, it was just what the comical bloated figures needed!

Finally, we come to the most haunting part of the stellar performance: the Ghost King who grants Goopy Baagha the three boons that change their lives, the lives of the kingdoms of Shundi and Halla, and the definition of fantasy in cinema. Chumki, the decorative spangles predominantly used in zardozi, combined with a soft light that diffused the reflected shine of the beads to work ethereal magic. The radish-like teeth crafted from shola pith – the milky white Indian cork that is hallowed by its association with Puja in Bengal — stuck out of the pitch-black body that had eyebrows whitened with paint. Finally, a thick white ‘sacred thread’ across its chest completed the appearance of the gigantic holy demon, Brahma Daitya.

The matching intonation? We all know by now: It was The Master’s Voice. Sound engineer Babu Sarkar had recorded Ray’s baritone, then played at double speed, and rerecorded it…

Only a genius of Ray’s stature could visualise this!

This essay is part of the online website dedicated to the Kheror Khata Satyajit Ray maintained, detailing the making of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. This was launched to celebrate the Birth Centenary of the legend. Republished with permission from TCG Crest.

[1] Folk theatre from Bengal

[2] Beyond the bounds of countries or time

[3] All ghosts

[4] Big Ghost Stories

[5] Nabiganj’s Demon

[6] Gosain Garden’s Ghost

[7] Rashmoni’s Jewel Box

[8] Four categorisations

Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award.

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Nostalgia

Ghosh & Company

Ratnottama Sengupta travels down the path of nostalgia with her ancestors, her parents, eminent writer, Nabendu Ghosh and his wife, Kanaklata

Nabendu with his children. From right to left: Ratnottama Sengupta, Nabendu Ghosh & Shubhankar Ghosh. Photo provided by Ratnottama Sengupta

Nabadwip Chandra Ghosh of Dhaka was an advocate who had mastered in both, Sanskrit and History. And he was a kirtan[1] singer par excellence. Both these traits have familial roots: His father was a court clerk, his cousin a doctor of those times. And all the males in the Vaishnav family — devotees of Prabhu Jagadbandhu Sundar of Faridpur — were good singers, a talent that was to continue with his sons and grandsons.

It was for his kirtans in particular that P R Das, brother of freedom fighter Chittaranjan Das (1870-1925), asked Nabadwip Chandra to join him as his junior in Patna High Court. The year was 1920. Bihar which was a part of the Bengal Presidency, was steeped in casteism. The Ahirs — Yadavs who tended cattle and sold milk — were exploited by the Bhoomihars, who were Brahmins, and if they retaliated, they were arrested and put in jails. By 1920s, the freedom movement too had gained steam but the political prisoners were also clubbed with the ‘hooligan’ Yadavs. Nabadwip Chandra fought courtroom battles to win this deprived section their political right, and came to be highly respected – a father figure for a large section of people in Bihar.

In fighting those battles Nabadwip realised one thing: the acute need for education among the so called Backward Classes. “Unless a person has education, he or she is not respected and remains vulnerable to exploitation, economic or otherwise,” he maintained. And education is best spread through mothers. Consequently he sought marriage alliances for his sons with daughters of teachers, sisters of lawyers and doctors, and — later — with undergraduates and graduates.

His elder son was married to Kalyani, the daughter of a school teacher. His third son’s wife, IA passed Sundara, was the daughter of a BA-BL – a lawyer in Bhagalpur. His fourth son’s wife, Namita was again the daughter of a teacher from Ranchi — and she was a graduate who was already teaching before she married, and did her MA after her wedding. So had Nabadwip Chandra’s daughter Rani who, after her tying the knot with Mahesh Chandra of Jorhat, completed her schooling and mastered in Economics. Further she taught in JB College, Jorhat and went on to become the vice principal whose students included Tarun Gogoi who rose to hold the high office of the Chief Minister of Assam.

In fact, Nabadwip Chandra’s own wife, Suniti Bala, was the daughter of a minister in the minor royalty of Jessore — a man who won a gold medal as one of the first matriculates of British India. His entire family was keen on education — and Suniti was not only literate, she received formal education at home before she was married at the age of 15 — which was pretty advanced for the first decade of 1900s. All her life, after child bearing, rearing kids, attending to household chores in the kitchen, she would spend her ration of leisure hours reading books and in her later years, telling stories to her grandchildren.

Nabadwip and Suniti’s second son Nabendu inherited his parents’ love for letters. And he took it to a much higher level as a writer who carved a place for himself in the history of Bengali literature and of Hindi Cinema. He started writing early, when still in middle school, as he wrote for and co-edited a handwritten magazine. Even as a teenager he would attend Sahitya Sammelans and while in College he got published in sought-after literary magazines.

But Nabendu did not stop with words alone. Along with singing kirtans, a talent he inherited from his father, he trained himself to dance in the mould of Uday Shankar. He would regularly dance and act on stage, in Patna and elsewhere in the state, and subsequently played memorable cameos in Bombay films too. Before he passed away at the full age of 91, he had penned 16 novels, 28 collections of stories, and nearly a hundred screenplays for Bollywood classics.

On January 31, 1944 he married Kanaklata. Sister of advocate Bhupendranath Ghosh from Malda. She turned out to be an architect of human lives. Kanak was born to Chandrakanta Ghosh, a landed gentry who was forward looking enough to will large tracts of agricultural land to his daughters at a time when all they were entitled to was Streedhan — jewellery given at the time of marriage. Still, his wife Dakshayani, who was ‘Karta’ — head of the Hindu joint family — after his death, decided to live a part of her sunset years in Vrindavan, the holy land of Vaishnavs.

Kanaklata had not completed her school years when she was married to Nabendu. But being a doughty soul, the 16-year-old not only read Nayak O Lekhak — Nabendu’s first published novel; she got it critiqued by an academic cousin (who later became a professor) before she consented to the marriage with a man older to her by ten years.

Kanaklata’s own education had to be shelved as she became a mother twice over; lost her first born; faced an uncertain future as Nabendu lost two successive government jobs because of his ‘seditious’ – anti-imperialist — writings; and then Partition uprooted the family that had to leave Bengal and seek livelihood in Bombay’s tinsel town. But, despite her young years, it was she who instilled in her husband the spirit to soldier on with his pen and not succumb to any compromise in his literary efforts.

She herself did not surrender her appetite for formal education to circumstances. Years after her sons and daughter had graduated from universities and she had become a grandmother thrice over, she enrolled in Open Classrooms and got her Master’s certificate in Bengali language.

In the intervening years? Her home provided a platform to umpteen writers, country cousins, sisters, nephews, nieces, even to nobodies. She was there at 2 Pushpa Colony when they wanted to pursue higher education in Bombay, or make a career in the country’s financial capital, or shine in the tinsel town. She helped to negotiate marriage proposals, and she supported in every way she could, those who sought medical intervention by specialists. Simultaneously she secured the financial future of her nuclear family by judiciously building houses and investing in government bonds.

Most of all, Kanaklata was the architect of the lives of her three offspring. Her eldest son Dipankar who, as a child, was legendary in family gatherings for his mischiefs and pranks, was groomed in Shivaji Military Preparatory School. Thereafter she ensured that he trained in Medicine at the Nil Ratan Sarkar Medical College in Kolkata. Once he became a doctor he served with Oxfam during the Bangladesh Liberation War.

This education stood him in good stead when he went to UK and joined the Royal Army Medical Corp that swung into action during skirmishes in Belize, the Carribian country in Central American land, in 1986, and again in Desert Storm, the first Gulf War of 1991. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1990, he was serving in Belsen, where the Nazis had set up a concentration camp sometime in 1943. He went to the minefields of Bosnia, which Princess Diana visited in 1997. In mid-1990s he was stationed in Brunei, where the British Military protects the Sultan; at the turn of the millennium, he was in Cyprus, which the British forces use as base for both military and humanitarian operations in the region that often saw dissonance. What a rich life of experiences in helping the injured and ailing!

At her insistence, Kanaklata’s second son Subhankar was trained in direction at the Film and Television Institute of India. He came out to be Associate Director of Damul (1984). He rose to partner his father in the making of the classic, Trishagni (1989), to direct the National award winning Woh Chhokri (1993). With teleserials like Yugantar, Nishkriti and Dances of India showing on Doordarshan he was a name to reckon with on the National network in its heyday. Then he went on to teach filmmaking in Mumbai’s Whistling Woods and to set up the wing of Filmmaking Studies in the National University of distant Fiji.

And Kanaklata raised the youngest of her brood, their only daughter Ratnottama, to cultivate the inheritance from her father, in literature, cinema and the arts. Even before the word global environment gained currency, by demonstrating how not to chuck everything in the bin, she drove home to her daughter the concepts of ‘re-use and re-cycle’. Blessed with green fingers, she shared with neighbours and friends the fruits of her ‘farming’ in the patch of green surrounding their Goan-style bungalow in the Mumbai suburb of Malad – and inculcated in her children the importance of green environs. Cooking, she taught me, was as significant in our everyday life as banking or management of money. And she drilled into me when I was still in school, that “you must earn, even if it’s only a hundred rupees every month. Else, even your own children will not respect you.”

I am always delighted to give this one example of her practical thinking. Soon as her daughter joined college, the home-maker booked a Life Insurance policy for her and directed her to pay the annual premiums. And how could she do it without compromising on her studies? “Simple. Clean the house, sell the waste to the raddiwala; put the ‘income’ in the bank.” At the end of the year, she had the money for the insurance premium and also the experience of banking. This, at a time, when majority of account holders in the bank were men.

Through all this, long before the world started celebrating International Women’s Day, Kanaklata had taught her daughter to be “no less than a son.” For, she ingrained in her, “there is nothing you cannot do if it spells well-being for people in your care…”

Nabendu and his wife, Kanaklata. Photo provided by Ratnottama Sengupta

[1] Religious songs

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Tags Bhoomihars, Brahmins, CBFC, Damul, Doordarshan, Fiji, kirtan, Nabendu Ghosh, National Film Awards, Partition, Ratnottama Sengupta, The Times of India, Trishagni, Uday Shankar

Essay

Freedom is another word for… Zohra Sehgal

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date August 14, 2022
No Comments on Freedom is another word for… Zohra Sehgal

Ratnottama Sengupta gives a glimpse of the life of a woman impacted by the Partition, spirited enough to be a celebrated performer and to have a compelling saga written on her life posthumously, Zohra: A Biography in Four Acts by Ritu Menon, published by Speaking Tiger Books. This feature is based on the book and Sengupta’s own personal interactions with the aging Zohra Sehgal.

Zohra Sehgal. Photo provided by Ratnottama Sengupta

Zohra Sehgal[1] mirrors, in a strange kind of way, the story of the Indian subcontinent.

Born a Khan in 1912, raised in purdah by the Nawabs of Rampur in palaces and mansions in Lucknow and Dehradun, educated in Queen Mary’s College of Lahore; trained in Western dance in pre-Hitler Germany; whirling through the globe and basking in limelight as the dancing partner of the phenomenal Uday Shankar; setting up her own dance school with husband Kameshwar Segal in pre-Partition Lahore; rising to carve a niche for herself as a member of Prithvi Theatres; dominating the screen as a nonagenarian cast against the legendary Amitabh Bachchan… Sahibzadi bestowed with an impulse to find her way in the world, made of her life what she would.

So, was it all sunshine and moonlight in the life of the lady who, when she turned 100, had the wit to say, “You are looking at me now, when I am old and ugly… You should have seen me when I was young and ugly…”? No. She had seen the failure of Uday Shankar Cultural Centre in Almora; the closure of her own dance school in Lahore. She’d relocated to Bombay and be a less appreciated ‘side-kick’ to her ‘prettier’ younger sister in Prithvi Theatres. She performed in makeshift stages more often than in the Opera House; traveled in third class compartments with the troupe, slept on trunks, washed her own clothes. She had to worry about providing for her children and their father. She had to cope with the whimsicality, alcoholism, depression and finally, the suicide of her husband… But the caravan of misfortunes never dampened her spirit. “If I were to be reborn, I’ll be back as a blue-eyed, five feet five, 36-24-36,” she could repartee with humorist Khushwant Singh.

But then, much of the tragedy unfolded around the Independence cum Partition at Midnight. And I thank Ritu Menon’s ‘A Biography in Four Acts’ for lifting the curtain on this side of Zohra Segal – the phenomenon I had the good fortune to know through the years we spent in Delhi’s Alaknanda area.

Zohra’s father, Mohammed Mumtazullah Khan had descended from Maulvi Ghulam Jilani Khan, the warrior chieftain of a clan of the Yusufzai tribe[2] and a religious scholar of repute who came to the Mughal court in Delhi possibly in 1754. Along with infantry and cavalry and the title of Khan Saheb he was given Chitargaon Pargana in Bihar, but since the British rulers were taking over Bengal and Bihar, he fled to Rohilkhand and joined the Rohilla chieftains who survived the battle against the Nawab of Awadh and rose to become Nawab of Rampur.

Zohra’s mother, on the other hand, descended from Najibuddaulah, another Rohilla Pathan[3] in the service of Ahmad Shah Abdali and the Mughals, who founded Najibabad in 1740 and received the hereditary title of Nawab. By 1760, the tract of land he ruled included Dehradun, Najibabad, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Badayun, Bijnor and Bulandshahar. After 1887 his descendents, being incharge of the Regency Council that looked after the affairs of the Nawabs, set up schools to teach English, impart western education, encourage education of girls…

So, like many of India’s Muslim royalty and landed gentry, the Mumtazullahs were largely liberal, often westernised, and mostly secular. Their daughters, educated in English medium schools, went on to become hightly qualified professionals, including as ophthalmologist or Montessori teacher. Their sons went abroad for further studies, as did Zohra’s betrothed Mahmud — her maternal uncle’s son who went to school in England, graduated from Oxford, became a Communist, married a comrade and distributed all his inherited land in Moradabad to the peasants. Her elder sister Hajra married Z A Ahmed, an alumni of the London School of Economics who, as a committed communist, organised railway coolies, press workers, farmers and underground members of the then CPI[4].

Yet, even for such a family it was unusual to send the daughter to a boarding school — Queen Mary College, founded in 1908 — in a distant city like the cosmopolitan Lahore. It was a purdah school for girls from aristocratic families from where Zohra matriculated in 1929. By then she had imbibed the secular, broadminded values of her mostly-British teachers, and of an education that placed equal emphasis on physical activities – sports, to be precise. Here Zohra was initiated into both, art and acting – two passions of Uday Shankar who proved providential in her life.

It wasn’t so surprising then, that after matriculating, she set out on an arduous, even hazardous, overland trip across Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey and Middle East, with a kindred spirit: her strong willed maternal uncle Memphis who, being a maverick much like Zohra herself, endorsed all her unconventional choices. He enrolled her in Mary Wigman Tanz Schule in Dresden; he financed her stay as too her owning a teeny-weeny car so she wouldn’t have to travel by train! None of this, however, ruled out her performing Namaz five times a day or reading the Koran. Years later, it was he who unreservedly stood by her decision to marry Kameshwar Sehgal when her own family was wary of the choice. And they spent their honeymoon in his house ‘Nasreen’ – now well-known as Welham Girls’ School. Built by an Irishman on five acres of land, it had pointed roofs, gables and half-timbering with extensive lawns, gravel pathways and exotic trees…

Young Zohra. Photo provided by Ratnottama Sengupta

‘Can you dance?’ Mary Wigman had asked Zohra. It wasn’t to her disadvantage that her sheltered childhood did not have the scope for that. A radical artiste herself, Wigman had rejected formal technique in favour of improvisation although Zohra had to master theories, alongside choreography and dramatic pieces that entailed limbering up exercises for the whole body, from fingertips and wrists to arms and shoulder, neck, head, back, chest, hips, knees, legs, toes… There were no mirrors: the training did not allow them to look at themselves while composing since, Wigman held, “consciousness and awareness should proceed from within rather than from an external image.”

All this was different from the grammar of classical Indian dancing – and by the end of her third year, when Hitler was hovering on the horizon, she was nimble on her toes dancing foxtrot, waltz, polka and tango. When she returned to Dehradun, she enjoyed a newfound freedom that expressed itself in cutting all her silk burqas to make petticoats and blouses!

Zohra delighted in the adventure of travel, in discovering new places and people. She sought out travel agents, pored over brochures, spotted packages to travel with groups, by trains or buses, walked with friends, rucksacks on their back and sandwiches in their pocket, to Norway, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, France. This was the time when Uday Shankar and Simkie – Simone Barbier[5] – were crisscrossing Europe. These stars of the Uday Shankar Dance Company were rapturously received by audiences who were mesmerised by the oriental exotica that had little to do with classical or folk dances of India. Instead, it offered romance and sensuousness wrapped in myth and mysticism. The blithe Adonis and his graceful energy cast a spell with his ‘physical beauty,’ ‘transcendental expression,’ ‘grandness’ and ‘command of muscles’. The ‘deep charm of the indescribable nobility’ of his dance became the face of ‘the rare yet mysterious personality of Modern India.”

When she joined Shankar in Calcutta as he prepared to tour Rangoon, Singapore, Moulmein and Kuala Lumpur, Zohra not only learnt to apply western make-up on an Indian face. She had to adapt if not unlearn her training at Wigman’s, to discipline her body and rehearse, rehearse and rehearse. For, at Shankar’s, there was no rule or theory. Instead, there were parties and dinners, meetings with the Viceroy and the Governor of Bengal, driving fast cars and boating, ballroom dances and cabarets too! If Zohra reveled in this, she also soon imbibed the almost religious atmosphere of Shankar’s performances that required them to travel regardless of the time of day or night and be in the theatre well before the hour in order to shed every thought other than the dance — one in which movements radiated from a concept and merged back into it.

Most of all, Shankar’s physical beauty and creative iconoclasm proved irresistible, and Zohra happily succumbed to the dancer and his stage lights. She saw how his unorthodox dance imagination reveled in sensuality and she marveled at its potential. None in India then was experimenting with form and movement nor choreographing for an ensemble. And then, Shankar was using a unique orchestra of violin, sitar, piano, sarod, gongs, drums and cymbals. The musicians composed for the dance, the dancers in glittering costumes moved on dazzling sets to their music. This transported audiences to unexplored aesthetic heights and conquered the world.

With Shankar, Zohra performed in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Greece, the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Switzerland. Belgium, Holland, Poland, Italy, France. By now, the company included Allauddin Khan[6], Ravi Shankar, Kathakali artiste Madhavan Nair, and Zohra’s younger sister Uzra. Names, all, that would go on to shine long after Shankar set up the Almora Dance Centre – modeled after Dartington Hall, a country estate in Devon, UK that promoted forestry, agriculture and education too, besides the arts. Before that, however, Zohra toured America performing love duets with Shankar, in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia. Wherever they went, they were greeted by applause and bouquets, photographs, reviews and receptions. Besotted audiences treated them like rockstars and on one occasion Pearl S Buck presented ‘the princess’ an autographed copy of The Good Earth.

On a subsequent visit to Bali with Shankar, she had the heady experience of romance and passionate discovery – of the splendours of dance and music on the island as much as her very being. The magnetic field that was Shankar aroused her senses thrilling awareness of her body. And on her return to India, she met Rabindranath in Santiniketan…

When the Uday Shankar Cultural Centre opened in 1940 at Almora, there were only ten students. As its repertoire kept growing, so did its popularity. Soon they were joined by Nehru’s nieces, Nayantara[7] and Chandralekha[8]; Guru Dutt who would one day become a celluloid maestro; Shanta Kirnan — later Gandhi — who’d shine on stage; Sundari Bhavnani who’d become Shridharani, the founder of Delhi’s Triveni Kala Sangam; and Shiela Bharat Ram, of the industrial family, who gained stardom as Baba Allauddin Khan’s disciple. Classes in technique combined with training under gurus of Kathakali, Bharatanatyam and Manipuri — Sankaran Namboodiri, Kandappa Pillai, Amoebi Singh — and to music by Shankar’s brother Ravi, and Baba’s son, Ali Akbar.

Zohra, besides assisting Shankar just like Simkie, also prepared a five-year course for the learners to improvise intricate movements. If theories of Shankar’s art gave form to his dreams, Zohra also learnt the importance of walking elegantly, suppleness of facial expression, and relaxation of mood, prior to dancing. The training evoked in his dancers the consciousness of the body as a whole. A body that moved in space to form patterns of intrinsic beauty.

Kameshwar Segal, a Rossetti-like boy, slim and fair with curly locks, slender hands and feet, fitted right into the scenario. The great grandson of one of the dewans – prime ministers – of the then princely state of Indore, he was well versed in Urdu and Hindustani besides his mother tongue, Punjabi. Soon he was a painter, set designer, light designer, mask-maker, handyman. Though Zohra, being involved with Shankar, had decided never to marry, she admired Kameshwar’s ingenuity, loved his humour and responded to his banter. Soon he proposed to his teacher. Zohra, senior to him by eight years, was aware of the odds against them. Yet she responded, perhaps because by now, the air in Almora was thick with romance and its byproduct, jealousy. Besides Simkie, so far recognised as his prime dance partner, there was Amala Nandi, whom Shankar would garland as his life partner. Simkie herself settled down with Prabhat Ganguly; Rajendra Shankar married Lakshmi Shankar, and Ravi Shankar married Baba’s daughter, Annapurna.

Photographs provided by Ratnottama Sengupta

Uzra, who had met Hameed Butt in Calcutta, also married the same year – 1942 – as Zohra. But, unlike Uzra she had to reconcile with a vegetarian, orthodox Hindu family of Radha Soami sect. Surprisingly, her uneducated mother-in-law welcomed the alliance more readily than Zohra’s own father who was used to the interfaith marriages of his own communist sons but didn’t wish for either Zohra or Kameshwar to convert. Jawaharlal Nehru was to attend the civil wedding which took place on 14 August 1942, in Feroze Gandhi[9]’s mother’s house in Allahabad, Zohra had learnt from his secretary. Her brother-in-law being Nehru’s secretary, the future prime minister of India had even shared that he would gift them Persian rugs. But two days before that the Quit India Movement[10] started, and Jawaharlal Nehru was jailed. Zohra, ever her sprightly self, had revealed her own story to me: “My brother received him on his release, and the first thing he asked was ‘Where is the young couple?’ I asked my brother, ‘Why didn’t you ask him where are the Persian rugs?’”

However, the dream wedding may have been the peak moment of happiness in the life of Kameshwar and Zohra. There on the WW2 gained in intensity, transportation became difficult, food and money too got scarce. In a couple of years, Shankar downed the shutters at Almora and went on to film his dream project, Kalpana. Simkie soon left India never to return. Sachin Shankar set up his ballet unit in Bombay. But before that, when Zohra put her all into starting Zoresh Dance School in Lahore of 1943, Kameshwar staked his claim as director.

When the school was inundated with students, she was forced into motherhood. When she returned to the stage, they went on a national tour with boxes and curtains from Lahore to Amritsar, Bareilly, Dehradun, Meerut, Lucknow, Allahabad, Patna, Asansol and Calcutta. Artistically a huge success, the school, however, left the coffers dry. More importantly, at the end of the Big War in 1945, Britain didn’t rule the waves and India was restive. The Muslim League was at loggerheads with the Congress, equations between the Hindus and Muslims had soured, their Muslim friends were looking at them with misgivings. Lahore clearly was not an ideal place for a couple like them. Kameshwar and Zohra relocated to Bombay, where Uzra and Hameed had set up home.

But in the city of celluloid dreams Zohra did not stand a chance in cinema. Not only was she short, somewhat plump, not quite a beauty; in cinema, a nachnewali was merely a nautch girl. In fact, she did not ever dance on stage again. She re-invented her fluidity of movement and expression to make her mark as a choreographer in Prithvi Theatres where her sister was already a leading lady. Eventually, in mid-1950s she choreographed for a few films such as Navketan’s Nau Do Gyarah and Guru Dutt’s CID.

Their bungalow on Pali Hill – a neighbourhood that was home to British, Catholic and Parsi families — was surrounded with Uma and Chetan Anand, his brothers Dev and Goldie, Balraj and Damayanti Sahni, Meena Kumari, Dilip Kumar, the Kapoors… Frequent visitors included Guru Dutt, Raj Khosla, Mohan Segal, Geeta Dutt, Nasir Khan[11], writers Sahir Ludhianvi, Sardar Jafri, Vishwamitra Adil, Amita Malik, composers S D Burman, and Ravi Shankar … Names that would in the next decade become Bollywood royalty.

Cinema was of course the big thing in Bombay of 1940s. Bombay Talkies had already heralded glory days with titles like Achhut Kanya (1936, untouchable maiden), Kangan(1939, Bangles), Bandhan (Ties, 1940), Jhoola(Swing, 1941), Sikandar(Alexander the Great, 1941). Devika Rani, Ashok Kumar, Leela Chitnis, Sohrab Modi, Prithviraj Kapoor were stars who would soon be joined by Punjabis from Lahore such as K L Saigal, Jagdish Sethi, B R Chopra, F C Mehra. Partition wasn’t a certainty yet, in the city of the political beliefs of Right and Left, mixed with industrialists and progressive writers and struggling artistes, the cry for freedom had created a ferment of ideas and the house resounded with scripts, arguments, reading, dancing, painting. K A Abbas, Sajjad Zaheer, Sadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Shahid Lateef[12] – they would associate with Utpal Dutt, Ritwik Ghatak, Salil Chowdhury, Hamid Sayani, Ebrahim Alkazi, Balraj Sahni and Prithviraj Kapoor[13], to pledge that they would present the crisis of the times through the medium of theatre.

Prithviraj[14], although a superstar on screen, believed that theatre should proliferate every city, not temples and mosques. Instead, he urged, “spend on theatres that would become centres for cultural education.” After the first election, when he was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1952, he’d said, “In that temple called theatre, a Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Parsi and Sikh all come together. No one cares whether it’s a pandit or a mulla [15]sitting next to them. Communists sit with communalists, to laugh together and cry together. It would be the biggest temple for the benefit of the nation.”

Such a person could not reconcile to the Partition of the subcontinent. It meant, in his own words, that “You will turn me out of Peshawar, and leave my unfortunate Muslim brethren here in the lurch, with their roots uprooted from the soil!” His protest took the shape of four plays that started in 1945 by underscoring the folly of dividing lives on religious basis.

The quartet began with Deewar (Wall), an original play thoroughly contemporary in its politics and communicating its message in a language everyman could follow. The Partition was symbolised by two brothers who, egged on by the foreign wife of one brother – played by Zohra – insist on dividing their ancestral home into two halves by erecting a wall. At a time when Jinnah was raising his pitch for a Muslim nation, the play interpolated the dialogue with speeches by him, Gandhi and Macaulay. So prescient was the message that the British government refused to allow the performance without a green signal from the Muslim League, despite the go-ahead by its CID and the IG Police.

Eventually, despite objection by certain Urdu papers, the play continued to play till 1947 with the peasants pulling down the wall in the climax. In reality, though, the Radcliffe Line concretised the division on the midnight of 14/ 15 August, unleashing bloodshed and misery for millions. On that fateful day, the play was exempted from Entertainment Tax for one full year. Deewar was performed 712 times between 1945 and 1959, until Prithvi Theatres folded up.

The secular credentials of the company is summed up in one practise: The actors began their days with voice production handled by Prithviraj himself, and singing rehearsed by the music director Ram Gangoli. And what did they sing? The base tones were practised by singing Allah Hu! While the high pitches intoned Ram! Ram!

In another expression of his secularism, after the Direct Action Day[16] riots unleashed on August 16^th by Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan, leaving 5000 dead and 15000 homeless in Calcutta alone, Prithviraj drove through the city in an open truck with Uzra and Zohra on either side. However, this Hindu-Muslim amity resulted in death threats for them.

And on the eve of Independence, the entire company gathered in the compound of Prithvi Theatres, unfurled the Indian Tricolour, sang Vande Mataram, then took out a procession. Zohra danced with abandon on the streets of Bombay, while Prithviraj’s son Raj Kapoor played the drum. The euphoria did not last: at a personal level Kameshwar was annoyed; on a larger level, death and destruction stalked the streets and the country was engulfed in the horror of untold violence.

Prithviraj’s immediate response was to stage Pathan, the story of two friends – a Muslim Pathan and a Hindu Dewan. When Tarachand dies, Sher Khan promises to look after his son as his own. Local feuds result in a revenge killing where Vazir is implicated. When tribal custom demands an eye for an eye, Khan sacrifices his own son, Bahadur. And when this scene was enacted, there would be no dry eye in the auditorium. Uzra and, in particular, Zohra immersed herself in the play along with Raj and Shammi, the two sons of Prithviraj, who played the two boys. Raj, then only 23, also travelled to Peshawar to design and redesign to perfection the single set of the play. The play was staged 558 times between 1947 and 1960, when curtain fell on Prithvi Theatres.

When rehearsals for the play were on, so was rioting in the cities and towns across India. Prithviraj would, without fail, visit the affected mohallas[17]and hold peace processions. The one dialogue that resonated long after the play ceased to be staged is still pertinent: “Do you want that Hindus should sacrifice their lives for Muslims and the Muslims should not sacrifice their lives for Hindus? Why should they not when they know they belong to one country, eat the same food, drink the same water, and breathe in the same air? Knowing this, you still raise this hateful question of Hindu-Muslim?”

Prithviraj truly believed that religion does not make for conflict, only the abuse of religion, turning it into the handmaiden of vandals, created conflict. “And it is the responsibility of art to present the true aspect of reality.” So, his next production, Ghaddar (Traitor) covered the period from Khilafat Movement to 1947 to deal with the question of the four million Muslims who had remained in India. If they were traitors, who had they betrayed – Islam or Pakistan? Prithviraj as Ashraf and Uzra as his wife join Muslim League but remain staunch nationalists. Shattered by the violence unleashed in Punjab after August 15, he vows to stay back and serve his motherland. He is therefore shot dead by a ‘friend’ Muslim Leaguer.

Zohra loved the cameo she played of a maidservant who refuses to go to Pakistan. Fully identifying with the sentiments of the character — whom she crafted after the family retainers in her mother’s home — she would add extempore dialogue, and these endeared her to the audiences. She was deeply pained that the Partition created personal loss in her family as many of her own people moved across while she, married to a Hindu, never even considered it. But, in covering the thirty-year span of the play she had to enact an old woman – and “feeling old from within” was against the grain of the ever-exuberant lady who, even at 102, would go to bed with a smile on her lips as she whispered to her long dead husband, “Wait just a little longer Kameshwar, I’m on my way to be with you…”

As with Deewar, Ghaddar too faced problems with censor board clearance. The chief minister of Bombay asked Prithviraj to approach the Central government. Sardar Patel introduced him to Nehru, who sent him to Maulana Azad. The Education and Culture minister not only gave him a letter of clearance but also a 50 percent reduction in train fare for all cultural troupes. But the Muslims boycotted the play; Muslim Leaguers in Cochin threatened to burn down the theatre; and some crazy elements wanted to shoot Prithviraj. When he invited people from Bhendi Bazar to watch the play, they concluded that, “People who have been shown as Ghaddar deserve to be shown as traitors.”

Meanwhile the entire population of villages — where their neighbours were their community, their family — were being uprooted in Punjab and Bengal. They were going crazy trying to decide, “To go or to stay?” People who didn’t know any borders were figuring out if, by crisscrossing the imaginary line, they would remain Indians or become Pakistanis. Would they forego their lifestyle by going or ditch their religion by staying? The questions assumed frightening proportion as two of Zohra’s brother, one of her sisters, and even her dearest Uzra relocated themselves in Lahore and Karachi.

However, the real tragedy in all this for Zohra was that Kameshwar had distanced himself from her. Never having found a foothold for himself in Bombay, he had taken to alcoholism, substance support, and perhaps occult activities. Her touring with the Theatre did not make matters easy. But the need to put food on the table combined with the draw of footlights, and acting became Zohra’s calling and, yes, her second nature.

Ahooti (Sacrifice), Prithvi’s final play in the Partition Quartet, was the story of Janki, who is abducted and raped on the eve of her wedding. She’s rescued by Mohammed Shafi and reconciled with her father in a relief camp. But when the family moves to Bombay, she is subjected to slander, and although her fiancee is willing to marry her, his father forbids that, compelling her to commit suicide. The story mirrored the life of countless ‘Partition widows’ – on either side of the border — who have found place in literature and, much later, in films like Shahid-e-Mohabbat Buta Singh(The Sacrificing Lover, Buta Singh, 1991) and Gadar:Ek Prem katha (Rebellion: A Love Story, 2001)too. The published estimates of the number of women abducted by the governments of both the fledgling countries put the figure at 50,000 Muslim women in India and 33,000 non-Muslim women in Pakistan. The enormity of the problem led the two governments to enter into an agreement to locate, recover and restore all such women to their respective families. But what of the women who had, in the meantime, acquired a new family?

In the original script it was to be the story of a mother and daughter but since Uzra had left the country, Prithviraj rewrote it as the story of a father and his daughter. Zohra did not have her heart in the play: first, becaue Uzra was not there; then, because her original role had been altered. Here too, she discerned Prithviraj’s self-indulgence. The play opened in 1949 to tepid reception and dull reviews that dubbed it ‘boring’. But the Deputy Genral of Bombay Police was moved by the girl’s plight and offered his services to help all such women. Prithviraj introduced him to one refugee whose daughter had been separated in the chaos of fleeing – and within days the daughter was found and restored to him. That is not all: at the end of the play the larger-than-life personality would stand with shawl spread out to collect any donation dropped into it, to help the relief work. Such was the emotional response that women even dropped their jewellery in the shawl – which Prithviraj soon requested them to desist from doing.

The Partition Quartet was to first perhaps to see where the rhetoric of religious difference can lead, the contest over territory can entail, the violence and violations that can result. Whatever the quantum of success or criticism they earned, they certainly provoked debate and affected political discourse that still hasn’t lost its sting. Zohra’s heart would swell with pride when Prithviraj rose to address conventions; call on people to turn his moves into a movement for peace. Through him she found herself performing in Punjab’s Firozpur jail, for prisoners who sat with hands and feet in chain… and she also got to witness the hanging of a man scheduled for the next dawn.

All this changed Zohra in a fundamental way: she shed her arrogance; she learnt to respect the dignity of everyone she worked with; she understood the transformative power of theatre. And perhaps she came to love her country, her people, her roots a little more.

[1] Born Sahibzadi Zohra Mumtaz Khan Begum (1912-2014)

[2] From the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.

[3] Pathans of Afghan origin who migrated to Uttar Pradesh in the 1700-1800CE

[4] Communist Party of India

[5] A famous French dancer in Uday Shankar’s troupe

[6] Allaudin Khan(1862-1972)

[7] Nayantara Sahgal

[8] Chandralekha Mehta

[9] Feroze Gandhi (1912-1960), Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s husband and son-in-law of Nehru

[10] The Quit India Movement started on 8^th August 1942

[11] All film stars

[12] Writers