Uday Shankar International Dance Festival

Modern dance in India has a father figure, and his name is Uday Shankar. Born in 1900 and settled for much of his life in Kolkata, Shankar created a wholly new idiom, a fusion style that adapted European theatrical technique to Indian classical, folk and tribal dance, and carried it to stages across India, Europe and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, laying the roots of the creative-dance movement in the country. Honoured with the Padma Vibhushan and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship, he died in 1977, but the movement he began, and the family and institutions he inspired, from his wife Amala Shankar to his daughter Mamata Shankar's Udayan dance company, have kept his legacy alive. The Uday Shankar International Dance Festival is West Bengal's tribute to that legacy.

Held around his birth anniversary on 8 December, the festival gathers dance troupes and soloists to celebrate the breadth of Indian dance in his memory. In earlier years it was organised by the West Bengal State Music Academy and staged at Rabindra Sadan in Kolkata, presenting a carnival of classical forms, Kathak, Manipuri, Gaudiya, Odissi, Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi, alongside the creative and fusion dance that was Shankar's own signature, and drawing participants from within India and beyond, including dancers from neighbouring Bangladesh.

In its most recent form the festival has moved to Santiniketan, the cultural town founded by Rabindranath Tagore. The 2025 edition, held on 5 and 6 December at the Srijani Shilpagram, marked the 125th birth anniversary of Uday Shankar and was organised by the West Bengal Dance Group Federation in collaboration with the Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre, featuring twenty-two dance troupes from districts across the state. Whether in Kolkata or Santiniketan, the festival's purpose has remained constant: to honour the man who freed Indian dance to imagine new forms, and to keep his creative spirit in living practice.