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Ahmedabad with Mallika Sarabhai
Portraying India
Perceptions of India, inspired by the lives of those who embody its most authentic spirit
Mallika Sarabhai is a woman who has lived several lives inside one, and lived each of them fully. A classical dancer & puppeteer by profession, a television anchor & social activist by a radical thought of change, and a writer who put her most private struggles into print. She grew up in a family where the people around her built space programs, dance academies, design schools and labour unions, where excellence was simply the expectation of any ordinary day. She absorbed those influences and then went out and made something entirely her own. Her performances carved a niche where the woman is never the passive object.
Now, in association with Darpana Academy of Performing Arts, Mallika Sarabhai continues a journey that began decades earlier with her mother’s vision for a space dedicated to dance, theatre and cultural expression.
Her journey in the arts began early. Mallika Sarabhai grew up in the Sarabhai household in Ahmedabad, where dancers, musicians, scientists and scholars frequently gathered to discuss and dine together. Her father, Vikram Sarabhai, was the man who gave India its eyes in the sky by establishing ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization), and her mother, Mrinalini Sarabhai, built Darpana Academy in 1949 into one of the country’s important centres for performing arts. Mallika Sarabhai grew up in Chidambaram, on the banks of the Sabarmati in Ahmedabad, a house where her bedroom had a glass-windowed wall facing the lawns and the unhurried flow of the river. She has spoken about both parents as great influences quoting that, “They have inspired me in every way; amma, in her aesthetics and in her power to transform ideas through art forms and papa, in his true devotion to the last Indian and a just and humane idea of India.”
She had joined Darpana’s Bharatanatyam class at the age of 5 to simply accompany all her friends. At 11, she joined Darpana’s puppet group and went on tour, a child learning to hold an audience, to tell stories larger than herself. She was quite certain well into her teens that she would never be a dancer. So, she graduated from St. Xavier’s College, Ahmedabad with a degree in Economics, then completed her MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, followed by a Doctorate in Organizational Behavior from Gujarat University. She has described ‘finding dance’ through grief of losing her father when she was just 17. This grief was shared by her mother. The two women unmoored by the same loss, found their way back to contentment. At 22, a Eureka moment made her decide that dance was what she wanted to do.
Even though classical dance forms were central to her training, she brought a strong theatrical quality to many of her performances, relying heavily on narrative and voice. Her work travelled widely through tours and festivals across Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States. In 1989, she performed a powerful, solo theatrical work Shakti: The Power of Women. Decades later, her production The Colors of Her Heart brought six women’s true stories of gender inequality and violence to New York’s Theatre incorporating spoken monologues, group and solo dances, moving the audience to tears. Sita’s Daughters has been performed over five hundred times in three languages.
It was her father’s dream to use television for education and empowerment, and she had always wanted to pursue it. Through Darpana Communications, over several years she documented 3,000 hours of life for Doordarshan Gujarati (India’s educational broadcast channel), travelling village to village to understand the concerns of women, harmony among communities, environment initiatives and more. The specific shows include the first NACO series on HIV awareness. She trained dance students at Darpana, as she put it, not to make dancers out of them but to send them into the world understanding culture and society.
The British director, Peter Brook, came to India looking for a Draupadi for his monumental production of The Mahabharata, and found her. Mallika Sarabhai performed the role for five years! First in French as written by Jean-Claude Carrière, then in English, touring the world in a play that asked ancient questions about justice and war and what it means to be a woman abandoned by the people who owe you their protection. She has said that her mother made her a performer, but Peter Brook made her a creator. She wanted to embrace her voice and to use it to fight the status quo. As she has described, it was a desperate need to use her art to speak about what was wrong in the world, about how human beings treat each other, about the injustices that pass for normalcy.
“...within the very strict traditional format of lyricising in Bharatanatyam, I am writing about gender, I am writing about violence, I am writing about human rights, I am writing about the environmental issues and always bringing in the gods, but questioning them.”
She has described her own life as an experiment in living, and it shows in a kind of fearless curiosity about what is possible when you refuse to be defined by expectation. She received recognition came from every direction. The Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the Padma Bhushan from the Government of India, the French Government’s Knight of the Order of Academic Palms, a Gold Medal from Mexico for her choreography for the Ballet Folklorico, marked how far her work had travelled and how many different worlds it had reached.
Through all these years, Darpana remained a constant presence in Mallika Sarabhai’s life. And the work continues in its 75th year. The centre has revived over ten dying art forms, including Bhavai and Andhra shadow puppets. Under Mallika Sarabhai’s direction it has expanded steadily into international residencies, cross-cultural collaborations, new productions that take on Shakespeare one season and Italo Calvino the next. Its music video addressing climate destruction, was chosen as the flagship video by UN climate agencies in 2022. Her son Revanta, himself now a celebrated Bharatanatyam dancer and choreographer who works alongside her. Although her efforts and approach has won her accolades around the world, that is not to say that any of it has been a smooth journey, especially for a woman being radical about change.
Ahmedabad is a 600 year old city that has been a trading hub, a textile town, a centre of learning, and a crucial landmark in the independence movement. Mahatma Gandhi chose its riverbank for his ashram and launched the Dandi March from here. In the decades after Independence, Ahmedabad became a meeting ground for artists, architects, industrialists, and educators. Institutions such as the National Institute of Design and the Indian Institute of Management brought new ideas into the city, while figures like Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Balkrishna Doshi, Isamu Noguchi, John Cage, and Alexander Calder spent time working and collaborating here.
Every January, the whole city goes up onto its rooftops for Uttarayan and transforms the skyline into a field of kites from dawn until nightfall, as the streets begin to smell of jaggery and fresh jalebi. In 2017, Ahmedabad became India’s first UNESCO World Heritage City, recognised for the diverse and rich historical architecture shaped by multicultural influences.
Recommendations for Further Exploration
To Watch
Mallika Sarabhai: Interview & Dance Experts
Darpana: The Story Before & The Story After by Shaan Memon Films
Mrinalini and Mallika Sarabhai in conversation with ITV India
Sita’s Daughters
At Tushita, we marvel at India with you. After 45 years of travelling through the country, we’re still enamoured by its beauty every day. From Ladakh, where Tushita was anointed by a Buddhist monk in 1977, to Tamil Nadu, where we worked with locals to showcase one of the oldest cultures in the world, we are partners in your journey to discover our part of the world.
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