Dibyendu's WallScript

Watching Carlos Saura’s Tango , my mind kept drifting back to an Indian pioneer who was never quite known as a “filmmaker” in the conventional sense. He was Uday Shankar, the legendary maestro of Indian classical dance. In 1948, at a time when Indian cinema was still in its adolescence, Uday Shankar created Kalpana —a film that, in many ways, marked the coming of age of this young industry. His work was nothing short of revolutionary, for it dared to experiment with the audio-visual medium in ways unheard of during those years. When Indian screens were dominated by melodramatic sagas and mythological retellings, Shankar re-imagined cinema as a stage for dance, for imagination, for protest. In Kalpana , crafted as a dance-drama yet embodied in cinematic form, he overturned the grammar of popular film. Watching Tango , I was struck again and again by the uncanny resonance between Shankar’s Kalpana and Saura’s film—the shared language, the similar intensity of perception. How far, after ...

The commander’s face was grim. How long would this war drag on? He, his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather—wars had continued for a thousand years. And yet the enemies of the State had never been annihilated. Now, with barely one hundred and fifty soldiers, he had to fight against two hundred and fifty thousand rebels. Such was the wretched state of the royal treasury. The rebels lurked all around his camp, waiting to strike at any moment. Fear. Nothing but fear. It was by wielding this fear that he must win now—else the fall of the State was inevitable. Monarchy itself would collapse into ashes. All those centuries of history, those lessons, those loyalties to the throne, those devotions to the State—lost in smoke. The very thought sent a shiver crawling down his spine. The entire land was watching him tonight. In such misery, only two things could be trusted: power, and the display of terror.   Sleep abandoned him. In the darkness of night, he paced the camp with a so...