Person · dancer & institution-builder
Rukmini Devi Arundale
Also known as Rukmini Devi, Rukmini Arundale
A Theosophist who learned ballet from Anna Pavlova's company, then took up sadir under Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai and founded Kalakshetra in 1936. She moved the form onto a concert stage, redesigned the costume and lighting, removed the explicitly erotic repertoire, and made it teachable to women of any caste.
- Date
- 1904 – 1986
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Tradition
- Kalakshetra records; dance revival historiography
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
She was offered the Presidency of India in 1977 and declined. What she did to sadir is argued about: a Brahmin woman's respectability made the form survivable in public at the moment the devadāsi system was being abolished, and the hereditary performers who had kept it lost their livelihood in the same decade.
Connections (2)
- Monastic foundationKalakshetra, Chennai
Rukmini Devi founded Kalakshetra at Madras in 1936 and within a generation had changed what Bharatanatyam was: a proscenium stage instead of a temple, a stitched costume instead of a draped sari, electric lighting, the erotic padams removed, and students drawn from any caste. The Madras Devadasis Act of 1947 ended the hereditary practice in the same decade, so the form was nationalised at precisely the moment its original performers were being put out of work.
- Teaching lineageThanjavur Quartet
The sequence Bharatanatyam performs — alarippu, jatiswaram, shabdam, varnam, padam, tillana — was arranged by the Thanjavur Quartet at the Maratha court in the early nineteenth century, and Rukmini Devi learned it from Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai, a nattuvanar of that line. What she changed was the setting, the costume and who was allowed to dance; the repertoire and the grammar she took whole from the hereditary masters.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Rukmini Devi Arundale”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
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