Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
Letter ID: 129
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
May 22, 1931
Udayshankar1 must certainly be a great artist in his line; the photographs are admirable.
Suhrawardy has imagination and occasionally a subtle 
felicity of feeling, language and rhythm; but his technique is chaotic and his execution very unequal. There are lines in this poem that sound like flimsy sentimental album verse and there are others that have a strange and fine originality, as in the fourth verse.
Older than the moon or forest she is,
Yea, older than the gray slow winding brook,
A picture of one that kings have loved
Fallen from a curious book
That is as fine in execution as conception; in the rest the execution does not equal the conception. I liked better the little poem you translated – that was perfect in its own kind.
“Bindsome” is, I suppose, an invention on the lines of “tiresome” and “winsome”; a poet is entitled to invent such words at his own risk and peril. Brocade is extraordinarily daring – unless he means “brocaded” dressed in brocade, and then he ought to have said “brocaded”; but otherwise it is a trouvaille [coinage] of audacious felicity, provided he can make the English language absorb so violent a turn given to the word. There is no reason why the poem should not be published in the Orient.
1 Udayshankar (8 December 1900 – 26 September 1977), a renowned dancer and choregrapher. He joined London’s Royal College of Arts and completed the five-year course in three years, obtained ARCA degree and diploma in composition. He met Anna Pavlova and at her request composed two pieces on Indian themes. He shared the stage with her. She inspired him to follow Eastern tradition of dance and not Western. He rediscovered India’s richness, learned Kathakali with Shankaran Namboodiri and adapted Western theatrical techniques to traditional Indian dance. He did several tours in Europe and America in the early 1930s with famous musicians, among them his younger brother Ravi Shankar, Allauddin Khan and Ali Akbar Khan along with Timirbaran. In 1939 he founded the Udayshankar Cultural Centre in Almora.