Chandralekha: The Rebel Choreographer Who Redefined Indian Dance

Radical in her approach to both art and life, pioneering dancer, choreographer, poet, and activist Chandralekha challenged longstanding structures that defined the field of dance in India, upturning rules that endured centuries, smudging the boundaries between art forms, and creating a distinct practice that was modern, unequivocally feminist, and secular in its ethos.

Born Chandralekha Prabhudas Patel in Maharashtra in 1928 and raised in Gujarat, her early life was profoundly impacted by the urgency of Indian politics. She was the niece of Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s first Deputy Prime Minister, a figure who played an essential role in the Indian independence movement. Her father, a doctor, was agnostic and instilled in his daughter an intense passion for reading. Her mother, a devout Hindu, often took her daughter with her on visits to temples, exposing the young Chandralekha to classical sculpture and religious art. This mélange of influences emerged in varied and unexpected ways over the course of her nearly six-decade spanning career.

Under the duress of her parents, Chandralekha went to Bombay (Mumbai) to read law. But in the midst of her studies, at the age of 17, she made the decision to drop out and relocate to Madras (Chennai) to pursue an education in dance, specifically Bharatanatyam, a classical style that originated in Tamil Nadu with roots in the spiritual ideas of Hinduism and Jainism. Taught by the venerable Ellappa Pillai, Chandralekha gained the finest classical training. But she had a desire to forge a new path, one that was untrodden, and her own.

She grew increasingly critical of the patriarchal and rigid structures governing Indian dance. She spoke openly about how classical dance was manipulated to serve religious and nationalist ideologies, catering to middle class sensibilities and tastes. Rejecting Bharatanatyam’s Brahminical and nationalist overtones, shortly after her schooling, Chandralekha began to build on her own avant-garde aesthetic, developing a style of movement rooted in humanism and sensuality.

Her choreography is a celebration of the human body, crucially, the female body. She sought to produce pieces that liberated the art form, led by intuition rather than tradition. Through her art, she was keen to present the body not as a vessel for divine worship, but as an instrument of power and resistance in and of itself. Dancers like her guru, Pillai, and Rukmini Devi Arundale were instrumental in shaping her early works. But it was T. Balasaraswati’s emphasis on bodily expressivity and her embracing of unfiltered emotion that had the greatest influence on Chandralekha.

At ease oscillating between artistic disciplines, alongside dance, in the 1960s she wrote prolifically, publishing a book of poems titled Rainbows on the Roadside: Montages of Madras. Shortly after, in 1972, the strikingly original work Navagraha was born. Elaborating on the dance piece, Chandralekha wrote: “Navagraha was another effort to interact with the conservatism of the classical dance world. Very deliberately, I pursued an approach involving leading vocalists, instrumentalists, graphic designers and filmmakers. I explored, to the full, abstract notions of time and space, stillness and movement, centre and cosmos. It represented a need to go back to the basics.”

Disillusioned, in part by the response to this work, in the mid 70s she took an extended hiatus from dance. During this time, she poured her energies into activism, campaigning for women’s rights and the environment. It was only in the 1980s that she would return to dance with a newfound energy, setting up the Chandralekha Dance Group. Around this time, she began mining other movement traditions from India, looking beyond classical dance for inspiration. She integrated elements from yoga, Kalaripayattu, a South Indian martial art, and Chhau, a semi-classical Indian dance form, to create a new and exhilarating vocabulary.

Marked by a stark minimalism and physicality, Chandralekha’s productions from this chapter, including works like Angika, Yantra, and Lilavati, challenge conventions of Indian dance by stripping away adornment. Confident and graphic, her works feel at once athletic and sculptural – perhaps influenced in part by the postures of the temple sculptures she observed on trips with her mother. In Yantra, for example, she probes the geometric and spiritual dimensions of the body in motion, drawing from the tantric idea of interconnected energies. Unsurprisingly, the largely conservative world of Indian dance was taken aback.
 

Outside India, particularly in Europe, Chandralekha’s work gained popularity. Celebrated international dancers and choreographers, like the German artists Pina Bausch and Susanne Linke, collaborated with her on various occasions. Seeping into spaces of activism, design, and literature, Chandralekha’s influence continued to extend beyond dance. A nucleus of South India’s creative scene, her home in Chennai, near Elliot’s Beach, became a gathering point for intellectuals, artists, and activists alike.

Presented for the first time in 2001, Sharira, was her final and perhaps most disruptive work. Challenging heteronormative codes of male dominance and female submissiveness that guide the performance of Indian sexuality, the piece is an intense, sensual, and provocative duet between a woman and a man. The work is performed with a glacial slowness that forces audiences to engage with the powerful presence of the dancers’ bodies.

Uncompromising in her vision right up to the end of her life – she passed away in 2006 aged 78 from cervical cancer – Chandralekha refused to conform to institutionalised expectations, opting instead to inspire individual exploration and rebellion. Her belief that dance should be an expression of the body’s primal energy rather than a codified tradition continues to influence her contemporaries. More than a dancer, she was a force of nature, leaving behind not just performances, but a radical way of thinking about movement, identity, and freedom.



Feature image: Still from Sharira: Chandralekha’s Explorations in Dance, 2003. Directed by Ein Lall