Mrinalini Vikram Sarabhai (11 May 1918 – 21 January 2016) was an Indian classical dancer, choreographer and teacher. A performer of Bharatanatyam and Kathakali, she founded the Darpana Academy of Performing Arts in Ahmedabad, created more than three hundred dance dramas and used dance to speak about social wrongs. She was the wife of the physicist Vikram Sarabhai, the founder of India’s space programme.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Mrinalini Sarabhai (née Swaminathan) |
| Born | 11 May 1918, Kerala |
| Died | 21 January 2016, Ahmedabad (aged 97) |
| Occupation | Dancer, choreographer, teacher, writer |
| Styles | Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Mohiniyattam |
| Founded | Darpana Academy of Performing Arts (1949) |
| Awards | Padma Shri (1965), Padma Bhushan (1992), Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship (1994) |
| Spouse | Vikram Sarabhai (m. 1942; died 1971) |
| Children | 2 |
Early Life
She was born into a remarkable family. Her father, Subbarama Swaminathan, was a barrister of the Madras High Court. Her mother, Ammu Swaminathan, from a Nair family of Palakkad, was a freedom fighter and later a member of the Constituent Assembly and of Parliament. Her elder sister, Lakshmi, became Captain Lakshmi of the Indian National Army.
She spent part of her childhood at a school in Switzerland, where she learnt the Dalcroze method of movement to music.
Training
She studied at Santiniketan under Rabindranath Tagore, whom she regarded as her guru, and for a short time at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Returning to India, she trained in Bharatanatyam under Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai, in Kathakali under Thakazhi Kunchu Kurup, and in Mohiniyattam.
Marriage
In 1942 she married Vikram Sarabhai, the son of an Ahmedabad mill-owning family, whom she had met in Bangalore. On the journey to Ahmedabad after the wedding, during the disturbances of the Quit India movement, a tear-gas shell injured her eye, and for a time it was feared she would not dance again.
Career
Darpana
In 1949 she and her husband founded Darpana in Ahmedabad, a city with no tradition of classical dance. It grew into an academy teaching dance, music, drama and puppetry, from which some eighteen thousand students have graduated. That year she also performed in Paris, to great acclaim.
Choreography
She was among the first to use the classical forms for contemporary subjects.
- Manushya, the life of man, in Kathakali technique without the traditional make-up
- a work on the deaths of young brides in Saurashtra, based on newspaper reports of dowry suicides, which she created in 1963
- pieces on the environment, on untouchability and on communal violence
- dance versions of Tagore’s works
She toured the world with her company for decades.
Other work
She wrote novels, poetry, plays and children’s stories, and an autobiography, The Voice of the Heart. She was chairperson of the Gujarat State Handicrafts and Handloom Development Corporation and worked for the Sarvodaya movement and for environmental causes.
Honours
- Padma Shri (1965) and Padma Bhushan (1992)
- Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship (1994)
- A medal and diploma from the French Archives Internationales de la Danse
- Honorary degree from the University of East Anglia
Personal Life
She had a son, Kartikeya, an environmental educator, and a daughter, Mallika, a dancer and actress who now directs Darpana. Her husband died in 1971 at fifty-two. She went on dancing into her eighties and was known to her students as Amma. She died in Ahmedabad in January 2016, and her daughter danced beside her body in farewell.
Featured image: Mrinalini Sarabhai in November 2008. Photo by Kadayanickadu, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
