Mallika Sarabhai: Dance as Discipline and Message

For Mallika Sarabhai, dance is both a physical discipline and a way of speaking in public. Training in Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi is demanding work, and she has said she was not always keen on it. This piece uses her Wikipedia biography, a university profile and an interview with The Hindu to follow how she turned that training into a career.

Ahmedabad, economics and management

According to Wikipedia, Sarabhai was born in Ahmedabad to the space scientist Vikram Sarabhai and the classical dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai. She studied economics at St. Xavier's College, Ahmedabad, completed an MBA at IIM Ahmedabad in 1974, and a doctorate in organisational behaviour from Gujarat University in 1976. The Hindu notes that she trained as a dancer from early childhood and turned professional after those degrees.

Training

In The Hindu she said her Bharatanatyam guru was Kittappa Pillai and her Kuchipudi guru C. R. Acharyalu, and that she used to cry when her mother came to her dance class because she held her in such high esteem. She described Acharyalu's Kuchipudi as having "rustic beauty and raw energy", unlike the "polite, Sanskritised version" common now. She also said: "I was a rather lazy child and dance demanded a lot of work."

Wikipedia says she began learning dance young and started her film career in parallel cinema at 15. She won the Golden Star Award for Best Dance Soloist at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris in 1977.

Draupadi

She played Draupadi in Peter Brook's production of The Mahabharata. According to her profile at Kerala Kalamandalam, where she is chancellor, this first brought her international notice, and the production toured countries including France, North America, Australia, Japan and Scotland. She told The Hindu she played the part for five years and was the only Indian in the multinational cast, and joked about arguing with five husbands in French.

Using the stage for change

In 1989 she created the solo Shakti: The Power of Women. Her piece Sita's Daughters has toured the world and was performed over 500 times in three languages, according to Wikipedia, though she gave a higher figure in the interview. Other works include An Idea Named Meera, In Search of the Goddess and SvaKranti. The play Unsuni, based on Harsh Mander's book Unheard Voices, went to around 120 schools and colleges. In 2012 she co-directed Women with Broken Wings, and in 2014 Kadak Badshaahi, a multimedia show about Ahmedabad's 603-year history that ran for 33 nights at Darpana's venue, Natarani.

Darpana

She manages the Darpana Academy of Performing Arts in Ahmedabad, founded by her parents in 1949, according to The Hindu. Through Darpana Communications she has produced three thousand hours of television, shown through Doordarshan, on women's empowerment and the environment. She has anchored shows such as Talk Positive, the first NACO series on HIV, and has been a columnist for several publications. Her memoir is In Free Fall: My Experiments With Living.

Honours

She received the Padma Bhushan. The Government of Gujarat gave her its Gaurav Puraskar, and the French government honoured her in the Order of Academic Palms. Sources differ on the year of that last honour, so none is given here.

A note on sources

The biography has little on her health, training schedule or lifestyle. Beyond the training details she gave in The Hindu, this article does not describe a regimen. It also leaves out her political career and personal life, which the biography covers.

Sources

*Cover photo: E P Sajeevan, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).*