Mrinalini means lotus in Sankrit. As the legendary danseuse Mrinalini Sarabhai fades into history, an elegant image of a fully blooming lotus remains as a reminiscent note about that radiant presence.
She lived and breathed dance till the end. Starting her journey from a small village in Kerala, she made big strides to scale the pinnacle of glory and be a universally acclaimed dancer.
Mrinalini could gracefully handle the fame that came along with her success only because she considered her dancing career and personal life as one long journey.
Mrinalini’s tryst with Bharatanatyam began at the age of 3. In fact, dance chose her, not the other way round, once she said confidently. “I’m a dancer, is what I told my mother when I was just five. “I didn’t tell that I was a dancer or I would become a dancer, but I told her that I’m a dancer”.
As she embarked on her creative journey, she discovered that dancing was a lotus with thousands of petals with different shades and hues.
Though known mainly as a Bharatanatyam dancer, her flawless postures and expressions enriched the dance forms of Kathakali, Mohiniyattam and Manipuri as well.
It was during her stay at the Shantiniketan in Kolkata that she got attracted to Rabindranath Tagore's ideas of nationalism and universal humanism.
He later became her spiritual guru and inspired her to widen her horizon and give classical dance new dimensions and perspectives. She always cited the example of her experiences with Tagore to explain how an encounter with another person would change one’s life and destiny.
She maintained that dance was the only thing that ever mattered in her life.
It shaped the entire consciousness of her being and never changed -- for it was the only direction of her heart, mind and innermost soul. However, she could look beyond the stage and straddle so many worlds.
As an artiste who considered dance as a fundamental spontaneous expression of humankind and a path to inner freedom and liberation, Mrinalini also excelled as a poet, writer, choreographer and environmentalist.
Her relationship with husband Vikram Sarabhai, the father of India's space programme, was an elegant dance of divine love. Married to a family with no history of dancers, Mrinalini remained resolute to showcase her talent to the entire world. It was this sense of resoluteness and devotion that helped her make the Darpana Dance Academy in Ahmedabad one of the popular names in the global art scene.
Beyond her dancing expertise and other personal achievements, Mrinalini also carried forward the rich heritage of her ancestral home, the ‘Anakkara Vadakkath tharavadu’ in Palakkad district. Her mother Ammu Swaminathan, who was parliamentarian and a well-known social and political activist, and father S. Swaminathan, a famous lawyer, were the leading lights of her esteemed life.
Also, her life story is intertwined with the fame and success of her brother advocate Govind Swaminathan, sister Captain Lakshmi and her daughter Subhashini Ali, as well as her own daughter Mallika Sarabhai.
Mrinalini’s death brings down curtains on an era which had multiple layers of significance.
The effulgence of her aesthetic and spiritual expressions and the visual poetry she created with her finely crafted movements will remain an inspiring memory until this art form stays alive in India.
Without confining her to the ‘Malayali tag’, let us pay rich tributes to this dancer par excellence.
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