Legendary dancer Amala Shankar, who died at the age of 101 on Friday, had a special connection with Chennai. She and her legendary husband Uday Shankar lived in a house on Boag Road in T.Nagar, and it was in that house after a performance that Uday Shankar proposed to his fellow artist Amala.
She had loved the handsome artist intensely, imagining him to be her Karthikeya. She knew there were many other women wooing him too.
At 97, she recollected the incident with glee in her eyes. Late night, there was a knock on the door and it was Uday Shankar! He told her he had decided to get married. Concealing her grief at the sudden news, she congratulated him.
He, 19 years older than her, asked her if she was not interested in knowing the name of the girl. He, in a movie script fashion, pronounced her name and swept her off her feet. She recollected, sitting in the house of Dr. Jagadeeshan of KJ hospitals, the agony and ecstasy of being married to the legend and how his heart was stolen by someone else but that it was she, Amala, who cared for him in his last days.
That house at No. 19, Boag Road (now Chevalier Sivaji Ganesan Road) was the venue for many rehearsals. Dancers Lalita, Padmini, Ragini and musicians Lakshmi Shankar and Kamala and several known names of art world conversed there.
The house was leased out to the Communist Party of India by Uday Shankar when the family moved back to Kolkata. But when the building was razed down for renovation, Amala Shankar was in Chennai and was engrossed in memories as she stood on the site and even danced a few moves. She was able to retrieve the name plates but not the steps on which the footprints of Uday Shankar, hers, son Ananda Shankar, daughter Mamta Shankar were embedded in cement.
She considered the family of Dr. Jagadeeshan her Madras family and kept coming back as often as she could. Their son Keshav and the grandchildren Manav and Vaibhav became very dear to her. Meera Jagadeeshan says their first meeting was in the eighties when she brought her troupe to perform for a function of KJ Hospitals. They had a long friendship and hosted her each time she came to Chennai. She would make a beeline to her tailor in T.Nagar who made perfect blouses for her.
“She made our grandson play the mridangam and dance to it, making the nine decades of gap between them disappear. They cried, Don’t go! each time she went back to Kolkata,” says Meera Jagadeeshan.
