Shanta Kalidas Gandhi was an Indian theatre director, dancer and playwright who was closely associated with IPTA, the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India.
18 Facts About Shanta Gandhi
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Shanta Gandhi studied with Indira Gandhi at a residential school in the early 1930s, and remained close to the prime minister in later life.
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Shanta Gandhi received many government awards and sinecures under the Indira Gandhi administration, including the Padma Shri and being made chairperson of the National School of Drama.
4.
Shanta Gandhi was the sister of actress Dina Pathak and Tarla Gandhi, a stage performer.
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Shanta Gandhi was a founder-member of the central ballet troupe of the Indian People's Theatre Association, and toured the country widely through the 1950s.
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Shanta Gandhi was awarded the Padma Shri in 1984 by Government of India and the 2001 Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in Direction, given by Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's National Academy of Music, Dance and Drama.
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Shanta Gandhi joined Pupil's Own School, an experimental residential school in Pune in 1932, where she became friends with classmate Indira Nehru.
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Shanta Gandhi later moved to Bombay, when her engineer father found her becoming too involved in the left-wing student movement in the 1930s and sent her to England to study medicine.
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Feroze Shanta Gandhi lived nearby, and the three of them would go out on the town together.
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When Indira and Feroze secretly became engaged in 1936, Shanta Gandhi was the only other person to know about it.
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Shanta Gandhi stayed there till it closed down in 1942.
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In 1958, Shanta Gandhi was called to Delhi as Asian Theatre Institute was being set up, she joined a Professor of Ancient Indian Drama, in the following year when it merged with the National School of Drama, she continued teaching and in the coming years revived ancient Indian plays starting with Sanskrit drama masters, Kalidasa, Bhasa, Vishakhadatta and Bhavabhuti.
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Shanta Gandhi was first to revive 4th century BC, Sanskrit playwright, Bhasa's through her productions of Madhyamavyayoga and Urubhanga, a decade before Pannikar and Ratan Thiyam began working with them.
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Shanta Gandhi later directed Vishakhadatta's Mudrarakshasa, Virkam Varman's Bhagavadajjukam all in Hindi.
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Shanta Gandhi did the design for the play, and it resurrected the Bhavai folk theatre from Gujarat.
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Shanta Gandhi revived interest in Jaishankar Prasad's plays, which though appreciated for literary content were deemed un-stagable by scholars, by successfully staging his 1928 historical play Skanda Gupta, with little changes to the original script.
17.
Shanta Gandhi remained Director, Bal Bhavan, Delhi and National Children's Museum.
18.
Shanta Gandhi was married to Marxist historian Victor Kiernan in 1938 in Bombay, but the couple divorced in 1946 before Kiernan left India.