Kumudini Lakhia tribute: Dancer, teacher, innovator

Kathak legend Kumudini Lakhia during performances in the 1970s. She passed away, aged 95, on April 12, 2025. (Images courtesy KADAMB Centre for Dance)

Obituaries about Kathak legend Kumudini Lakhia who passed away on Saturday at the age of 95 emphasize her legacy as a teacher and an innovator who revolutionized Kathak. I met her in the early 2000s as a frequent visitor to Ahmedabad, the city she had made her home. Kumudini or Kumiben, as she was widely known, was then in her 70s and the conversations I had with her, gave me an insight into her personality and relentlessly modern outlook. Some recollections below.*

Kumiben’s early life (birth in a culturally evolved Maharashtrian household, growing up in Mumbai with a training in sports and dance, joining modern dancer Ram Gopal’s troupe in London at age 18) was unusually progressive. One would have thought that this streak would end when marriage (to a musician from Ram Gopal’s troupe) brought her to Ahmedabad. But in fact, it was the provincial city that opened up her horizons in new, unexpected ways.

In the 1960s Ahmedabad’s wealthy textile mill-owners invited stars of American modernism, the dancer Merce Cunningham and the musician John Cage to the city.

Merce Cunningham (left) at a rehearsal with his dance company in Avignon. (Image credit: Photographies de spectacle / Anne Nordmann via Wikimedia Commons)

Kumiben recalled the Cage show at the Town Hall. The New York-based composer of 4’33’, a piece that showcased the normal sounds of the immediate environment, had asked for all the doors and windows to be opened. The sounds of the street washed over an expectant audience. Cage entered with a mud pot and dropped it. It rolled.

Gadgadgadagadgad

He said: ‘Sound ... is in everything.’ The strains of a synthesizer rose behind him, playing the popular Hindi film tune: Man dole mera tan dole.

Kumiben hummed the song with an exaggerated quaver to mimic the snake charmer’s flute on which the song was based. ‘And I thought to myself,’ she said, ‘if a musician of his stature can look outside himself and his milieu, why not us?’

Musician John Cage (Image credit: Sipalius via Wikimedia Commons)

It was typical of Kumiben, to soak up inspiration from wherever it came, including and perhaps especially from outside the world of dance. She was scathing about her early traditional dance teachers and their approach of treating classes “like an akhada where you had to go and show your kamal on stage.  My teachers did not like students to think for themselves. They wanted to imprison you in a gharana.” As she said this, she locked her fingers.

“But I was always seeking to get out.”  One of her fingers darted out, like a deer.

In Ahmedabad she found teachers in her peers, the architect Balkrishna Doshi and the sculptor-painter Pir Sagara, among others. “I kept talking to them” she said, “learning from them about how they used space, about techtronics in architecture and so many other things.”

Architect Balkrishna Doshi (Image via X)

On one of my visits to Ahmedabad, Kumiben suggested that she and I go to Science City, a new much-touted attraction in the city and we drove out a few miles to see for ourselves what it was all about. Another time we were leaving a restaurant, and she asked if I would help her walk over the uneven ground to another wing of the premises: she had read in the newspapers about the fancy interior work and she wanted to see it for herself.

This preoccupation with learning and her interest even in the most mundane developments in her immediate environment, told me something of her process as an innovator. Alongside her fascination with the new, though, was also a wisdom about processes and the time it took for a line of inquiry to reach fruition.

“This is how a young student starts out,” she once told me and stretched and twisted her arms to mimic a clumsy practicing motion. “Time passes and then, one day, without her knowing how, her arms go like this”, and her arms rippled now like water. “In an instant, all that practice comes together, and she has matured into a dancer”.

Kumudini Lakhia at the KADAMB Centre for Dance in Ahmedabad. (Photo credit: Devansh via KADAMB Centre for Dance)

Many of Kumiben’s former students (Daksha Sheth, Aditi Mangaldas) and collaborators (Akram Khan) are well-known names in contemporary dance. I was witness myself to the legion of students that surrounded her, an ever-replenishing carousel of eager learners from all over the world, drawn by her reputation no doubt but apparently not daunted by it once they knew her.

Her lack of pretension was disarming. She was genuinely interested in people and keen to hear their stories. And she had no snobbery about high and low art: one might hear her make a profoundly original observation—about the difference of form in Vaishnav and Shaivite temples, for example—while deeply immersed in a lurid television soap or a tennis match (a game she was passionate about).

In her tasteful saris (earth tones and natural fabrics) and matching beads she looked every inch a diva. But underneath the exterior of the elegant professional was a very deep engagement with family and domesticity. Many mornings I would find her stringing beans, bustling about with a duster in her hand, bantering in Gujarati with the vegetable hawker or wandering around her small garden, her dachshund waddling at her heels, inspecting the trees and plants and exchanging observations with the maali if he was there.

She was as real as her choreography was ethereal. She was earthy in her movements and in her sharp laughter—I speak of course of an elderly Kumiben not the lissome dancer but the doyen. And her productions were exquisite and deeply moving. I think they came from a place which she kept a little apart from everything else. That while she was engaged with a myriad things, this part of her was silently at work, processing and watching.

I remember her once telling me that as a choreographer, she always looked for movement. “In leaves, in flowers, in everything—I am constantly looking for movement. Like a musician looks for sound, I look for movement.” I recalled this as I watched an interview with her from 2022 where at the age of 92 she held forth on the question: ‘Why I dance’. The reasons why I chose dance are many, she said, but having danced my whole life, ‘dance is me. My whole existence is for dance...”