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ABSTRACT
When George Bernard Shaw called Dartington Hall ‘a Salon in the Countryside’, it was a paean to its wealthy owners and their ‘utopian’ plans to establish a place of experiment and innovation in the Devonshire countryside in the 1920s. The Elmhirsts prioritised dance from the beginning, lavishing considerable resources upon its development, such that when Oriental dancer Uday Shankar was introduced to Dartington in 1934 he found willing benefactors to support his desired centre for dance in India. Artists are seldom born with silver spoons in their mouths, but even if so fortunate, they sometimes take pleasure in inviting troubles throughout their lives. Shankar’s dance centre foundered within four years, mired in his financial mismanagement and artistic disagreements in the face of wide-ranging political turmoil in India. This article explores how the motives of Uday Shankar’s patrons, at a time of heightened anti-colonial sentiment in India and a rapidly changing cultural and artistic landscape, ranged from artistic to educational, from political to personal. And while his patrons long sustained Shankar, their support was ultimately contingent on their view of the educational potential of his work rather than his desire to forge a renaissance in Indian dance culture.
Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its support of this research and for assistance from the South West Heritage Trust: Devon Archives in Exeter, UK.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Michael Young, The Elmhirsts of Dartington (Totnes: Dartington Hall Trust, 1996), 100.
2. William Swanberg, Whitney Father, Whitney Heiress (New York: Scribner, 1980).
3. Victor Bonham-Carter, Dartington Hall. the History of an Experiment (London: Phoenix House Ltd, 1958).
4. Ivor Stolliday, ‘History of the People Associated with Dartington’, last modified 2004. http://www.baacorsham.co.uk/images/dartington.pdf (accessed December 7, 2017), 1.
5. Tom Cornford, ‘A New Kind of Conversation: Michael Chekhov’s ‘Turn to the Crafts’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 4, no. 2 (2013): 191, doi:10.1080/19443927.2013.794158.
6. Maurice Punch, Progressive Retreat: A Sociological Study of Dartington Hall School 1926–1957 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 20.
7. Punch, Progressive Retreat, 157.
8. Larraine Nicholas, Dancing in Utopia: Dartington Hall and its Dancers (Binsted: Dance Books Ltd, 2007), 21. See also Fernau Hall, The Anatomy of Ballet (London: Andrew Melrose, 1953) for a critical appreciation of the work of leading dancers at Dartington Hall during these years.
9. Hillel Schwartz, ‘Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century’, in Incorporations (New York: Zone, 1992), 71–127.
10. Nicholas, Dancing in Utopia, 9.
11. Linda J. Tomko, Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890–1920 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).
12. Jane Brown, Angel Dorothy: How an American Progressive Came to Devon (London: Unbound, 2017), 1.
13. Isadora Duncan for example, danced at Mrs Astor’s villa in wealthy Newport and for other society figures who hired artists to entertain their guests.
14. Willard Straight initiated the magazine Asia, which Dorothy continued to support.
15. John Dewey, Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude (New York: Holt, 1917), 67–8.
16. Named the William C. Whitney Foundation in 1937. See also Eric Rauchway, ‘A Gentleman’s Club in A Woman’s Sphere: How Dorothy Whitney Straight created The New Republic’, Journal of Women’s History 11, no. 2 (1999): 61–79.
17. Ruth St Denis received support from Dorothy’s New York committee and later visited Dartington with Tagore during her 1930–1 tour of Europe. Protima Devi, Nritya (Calcutta: Viva Bharati University Press, 1949).
18. David Benjamin Rees, Vehicles of Grace and Hope: Welsh Missionaries in India, 1800–1970 (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2002), 59.
19. Leonard K. Elmhirst and Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore: Pioneer in Education, Essays and Exchanges Between Rabindranath Tagore and L.K. Elmhirst (London: John Murray, 1961), 10–11.
20. Stolliday, ‘History of the People’, 2.
21. The funds were provided to build the Willard Straight Hall, a student union building at Cornell dedicated to her late husband’s desire to make Cornell ‘a more human place’.
22. Leonard co-authored a number of other books related to rural reconstruction, including Poet and Plowman (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1975).
23. Elmhirst and Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, 102.
24. Kathleen O’Connell, Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet as Educator (Kolkata: Visva-Bharati, 2012), 202.
25. Rudra Prasad Chakraborty, Rangamancha O Rabindranath (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1995), 180.
26. The Dartington Hall Trust was set up in 1932 with one million pounds of Dorothy’s money, merging the Land Trust, the School Trust and the Dartington Trust into one. Leonard was chairman and remained so until 1972. The other trustees were Dorothy and two legal advisers, Fred Gwatkin and Pom Elmhirst (brother of Leonard). The trust was a charitable one and hence exempt from British income tax. The rest of Dorothy’s money was placed into two trusts for her five children: The William C. Whitney Foundation in New York for her American children and the Elmgrant Foundation for her British children. Young, The Elmhirsts, 298–9.
27. Young, The Elmhirsts, 227.
28. Mohan Khokar, His Dance, His Life: A Portrait of Uday Shankar (New Delhi: Himalayan Books, 1983), 91.
29. Bonham-Carter, Dartington Hall, 128.
30. Khokar, His Dance, His Life, 95.
31. Nicholas, Dancing in Utopia, 123.
32. Charn Kamal Kaur Jagpal, ‘I mean to win: the nautch girl and imperial feminism at the fin de siècle’ (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2012), 19, ProQuest (870030955); Margaret E. Walker, India's Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective (New York: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 4.
33. Edward Ross Dickinson, Dancing in the Blood: Modern Dance and European Culture on the Eve of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 230.
34. Ibid., 232.
35. Ibid., 231–2; Walker, India’s Kathak Dance, 40.
36. Walker, India’s Kathak Dance, 40.
37. Prarthana Purkayastha, Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 54.
38. Ibid., 55.
39. John Kasson, Amusing the Millions: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 17.
40. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), 90.
41. Jane Desmond, ‘Dancing out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St Denis’s Radha of 1906’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17, no. 1 (1991): 28–49; Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Olivia Whitmer, ‘Dancing the Past into the Present: Ruth St Denis and Bharatanatyam’, Journal of Popular Culture 37, no. 3 (2004): 497–504; Christina Shlundt, ‘Into the Mystic with Miss Ruth’, Dance Perspectives, 46 (Summer 1971).
42. Deborah Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 131.
43. Joseph H. Mazo, Prime Movers: The Makers of Modern Dance in America (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1977), 72.
44. Joan Erdman, ‘Who remembers Uday Shankar?’ accessed December 7, 2017, https://mm-gold.azureedge.net/new_site/mukto-mona/Articles/jaffor/uday_shanka2.html.
45. Ibid., 2.
46. He recommended Tagore for the Nobel Prize for his poetry in Gitanjali.
47. Ashok Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Uday Shankar: Twentieth Century’s Nataraja (New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2004), 21.
48. Daniel M. Stephen, ‘Brothers of the Empire? India and the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–5’, Twentieth Century British History 22, no. 2 (2011): 182.
49. Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, ‘A Productive Distance from the Nation: Uday Shankar and the defining of Indian Modern Dance’, South Asian History and Culture 2, no. 4 (2011): 483, doi:10.1080/19472498.2011.605294.
50. Said, Orientalism, 2.
51. Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, ‘In the Shadow of the Nations: Dissent as Discourse in Rabindranath Tagore’s Political Writings, 1914–1941’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 35, no. 1 (2012): 173, doi:10.1080/00856401.2011.648911.
52. Fernau Hall, Anatomy of Ballet (London: Andrew Melrose, 1953), 278–9.
53. Alice Boner and Georgette Boner, Alice Boner Diaries: India 1934–67 (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1993).
54. Nandini Majumdar, ‘Remembering Alice Boner, A Swiss Artist in Search of form in India’, The Wire, September 1, 2016, https://thewire.in/63284/remembering-alice-boner-a-swiss-artist-in-search-of-form-in-india/.
55. Correspondence from Alice Boner [hereafter AB]. to Uday Shankar [hereafter US], March 4, 1939, LKE/IN/19/B 1939–1940, South West Heritage Trust: Devon Archive Catalogue, Exeter, UK
56. AB to US,March 4, 1939, LKE/IN/19/B 1939–1940.
57. AB to Leonard Elmhirst [hereafter LKE], January 18, 1939, LKE/IN/19/B 1939–1940.
58. Projesh Banerji, Uday Shankar and His Art (Delhi: B.R. Publishing, 1982), 62–3; Bhattacharjya, ‘A Productive Distance’, 491.
59. Purkayastha, Indian Modern Dance, 36.
60. Girish N. Mehra, Nearer Heaven than Earth: The Life and Times of Boshi Sen and Gertrude Emerson Sen (New Delhi: Rupa and Son, 2007), 532.
61. Larraine Nicholas, ‘Dance History as an Imagined Space: The Dance School at Dartington Hall, Its Mutable Past and Uncertain Future@ (paper presented at Society of Dance History Scholars Conference Proceedings, Riverside, California, June 2008), 137–40.
62. Cornford, ‘A New Kind of Conversation’, 189–203.
63. Khokar, His Dance, His Life, 95–6.
64. Firoz Khan Noon, Making Britain: Discover how South Asians shaped the nation, 1870–1950. http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/firoz-khan-noon (accessed December 7, 2017).
65. LKE to AB, 13 January 1939, LKE/IN/19/B 1939-1940.
66. John Martin, Review, New York Times, December 27, 1938.
67. Tagore letter, October 24, 1937, 2G LKE archive.
68. Khokar, His Dance, His Life, 97.
69. B.N. Tandon, Review of Nearer Heaven than Earth: The Life and Times of Boshi Sen and Gertrude Emerson Sen, ed. Girish Mehra, Indian Literature 51, no. 3 (2007): 199–203, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/23340474.
70. Young, The Elmhirsts, 225; Mehra, Nearer Heaven, 310.
71. Fernau Hall, ‘Honoring Uday Shankar’, Dance Chronicle 7, no. 3 (1984): 337.
72. B. Sen to Beatrice Straight [hereafter BS], October 28, 1943, LKE/IN/19/D 1943-1946.
73. Quoted in Mehra, Nearer Heaven, 538.
74. Letter from George Birse to LKE, Almora July 1931, LKE archives, Dartington.
75. Mehra, Nearer Heaven, 536.
76. Ibid, 539.
77. US to BS, October 28, 1943, LKE/IN/19/D 1943-1946.
78. Mehra, Nearer Heaven, 539.
79. Typescript of Production of ‘Kalpana’ and its Finances by US, 27 February 27, 1947, LKE/IN/19b/A 1947-1949.
80. Prarthana Purkayastha, ‘Dancing Otherness: Nationalism, Transnationalism and the Work of Uday Shankar’, Dance Research Journal 44, no. 1 (2012): 70, doi:10.1017/S0149767711000386.
81. Mehra, Nearer Heaven, 539.
82. Purkayastha, ‘Dancing Otherness’, 87.
83. Ruth K. Abrahams, ‘The Life and Art of Uday Shankar’ (PhD diss., New York University, 1985), 204, ProQuest (303396600).
84. Mukhopadhyay, Uday Shankar, 47.
85. LKE to US, June 29, 1949, LKE/IN/19b/A 1947-1949.
86. LKE to US, September 23, 1954, LKE/IN/19b/C 1953-1962.
87. Abrahams, ‘The Life and Art’, 205–6.
88. Baldwin, Todd & Lefferts to BS, September 28, 1948, LKE/IN/19b/A 1947-1949; BS to US, December 1952, LKE/IN/19b/B 1950-1969; BS to US, December 1952, LKE/IN/19b/B 1950-1969.
89. Sally Banes, ‘Where They Danced: Patrons, Institutions, Spaces’, Dance Chronicle 25, no. 1 (2002): 95.
90. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 2009); Michel Foucault and Robert J. Hurley, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1, An introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990).
91. Hall, ‘Honoring Uday Shankar’, 326.
92. Erdman, ‘Who remembers’, 3.
93. See for example Purnima Shah, ‘State Patronage in India: Appropriation of the Regional and National’, Dance Chronicle 25, no. 1 (2002): 125–41.
94. Erdman, ‘Who remembers’, 3.
95. Abrahams, ‘The Life and Art’, 176.