Sunil Kothari has a reputation of being omnipresent. From California to Kolkata, look for any dance event and Kothari is most likely to be there, bubbling with enthusiasm and energy that defy his 68 years. Only, in Delhi he tends to traipse through glass partitions, cutting his face and breaking his front teeth. To top it off, this most active of Indian dance historians is up for a major surgery. Just when people sought him at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) where he is curating the big Uday Shankar centenary exhibition and seminar, which opened last week, he is actually trying to run away from a south Delhi nursing home with catheters clinging to his frail body.

VERSATILE ARTISTRY: Shankar playing an Indian nautch girl in a Paris cabaret in the mid-1920s

Notwithstanding such ardent passion to remind a forgetful nation about the dance legend of the early 20th century, there are few takers for the Uday Shankar legacy today. The memory and relevance of this brilliant but definitely orientalist phenomenon has perhaps been overshadowed by the celebrity of his own younger brother, sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, on the one hand and by the work done by neo-classical revivalists like Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, Rukmini Arundale and Mahakavi Vallathol on the other.

As Kothari recounts the life and times of Shankar senior through archival photographs, reminiscences of family and associates and the dancer's experimental film Kalpana, his words ring and bounce back from the uneven walls of ignca's Mati Ghar. For those who have read Ravi Shankar's various autobiographical writings or those of other Shankar associates like Zohra Segal, Kothari trails a known and well-beaten path. More significantly, he carries with him the now out-of-print book on Shankar written by dance scholar Mohan Khokar like the Holy Bible. Given the tortuous relationship the late Khokar had with the IGNCA authorities, this is a brave acknowledgement and a decent thing to do.

"I uncovered a lot of new material during my last visit to Dartington Hall in the UK," claims Kothari, brandishing a copy of some letters he exchanged with the authorities at that unique if somewhat dated haven for the arty, the spiritual and the exotic. "They have even kept a letter I wrote to them in 1969 asking for an appointment to research the Uday Shankar connection." Indeed, that would explain why Sushma Bahl of the British Council gets to grace a session at the seminar as chief guest. A more interesting new angle in the exhibition is probably the inclusion of some original works by Alice Bonner, the Swiss artist who was one of Shankar's many benefactors.

PASSIONATE CURATOR: (From above to below) Kothari's exhibition uses photographs, film and reminiscences to revive memories of Shankar; Shankar and Pavlova in Radha-Krishna, 1924

At a minimal cost of Rs 5 lakh, the exhibition and seminar are probably the cheapest events organised by the IGNCA, remembered for its grandiose shows on rarefied matters like Kham and Kaal on which 10 times such figures were spent in the past. This, thus, is a small tribute to a remarkable man who was once very big. But that was a long time ago-circa 1924-when prima ballerina Anna Pavlova discovered this young handsome Bengali Brahmin to partner her in some highly successful performances like Radha-Krishna and Hindou Marriage. That was the time when Britain and Europe were dabbling in theosophy and spiritualism. Gurdief was the toast of the salons and the likes of Ruth St Dennis were busy making a genre out of what they called Oriental Dance. Peacock feathers, sheer sari-type costumes and lots of erotic appeal were the stuff that excited the impresarios.

Though the western rage for oriental dance was soon to die out, Shankar rode its crest to form his own company along with his family of many brothers, a string of female partners and some distinguished musicians like Timir Baran, Vishnudas Shirali and, for a short time, even Baba Allauddin Khan. But by the late 1930s the cynics in the western media were reporting on Shankar's tours with tongues in their cheeks. Sample this report from a London paper, titled "Women's Delight": "Ardently admired by repressed women throughout the world, India's best Press agent, Uday Shan-Kar, returns for the first time after 1932. This man whom Pavlova described as 'a born dancer with the finest dance body I have seen in any man in any country', has been variously dubbed as core of the cosmos, exalted, rarefied, exotic ... Since men don't seem to get the idea, Shan-Kar's matinees are jam-packed, his evenings just comfortably filled."

Shankar gave to us the curious and, for a time, hugely popular genre called the Indian ballet. In historical terms his genre can be likened to Raja Ravi Varma's Indian paintings-western techniques of presentation and perspective applied to patently Indian themes. Yet, in the western context, both Shankar and Varma were dated for their own times and far from the Parisian avant garde. Neither of them touched the likes of an Isodora Duncan, a Matisse or a Picasso. Later, Shankar did attract a band of younger talents like Shanti Bardhan, Segal and Kameshwar Sehgal and the still performing Narendra Sharma around him in the idyllic climes of Almora where he set up his institute during the World War II. This tight group did rule the "creative" dance scene through the post-Independence period but nothing significantly lasting ever came out of it.

The problem with Shankar's style was its ambivalence between an ersatz modernism and its simplistic re-creation of what the West imagined Indian tradition to be. Unfortunately for Shankar and his followers, revivalists like Arundale, Vallathol, Paluskar and Bhatkhande had done such a good job with the neo-classical traditions in dance and music that even Ravi Shankar decided to delve deeper into the classical rather than skim its surface searching for something not quite palpable.

Given the pressures that work on anyone who works with state funds, Kothari has felt obliged to include anyone who wields any influence with the otherwise irrelevant government cultural machinery. The week-long seminar, apart from the participation of the Shankar family and associates, is thus filled with crusty institutionwallas. In an agenda filled with nostalgia and platitudes, nowhere is there any attempt to re-evaluate Shankar and his oeuvre in today's context. Neither is there any endeavour to problemise the subject. And this perhaps will be the single failing of this celebration. Kothari's major passion can easily become, like its exalted subject, exotic but sadly irrelevant.