Rukmini Devi Arundale Danced Bharatanatyam on a Stage at Adyar in December 1935, Opened Kalakshetra on 6 January 1936 and Went On to Lead the Animal Welfare Board of India

On 30 December 1935, at the Theosophical Society’s headquarters in Adyar, then part of Madras, a 31-year-old woman named Rukmini Devi danced Bharatanatyam for an audience of more than a thousand, according to the Sahapedia entry by the dance historian Ashish Mohan Khokar. On 6 January 1936 the arts school that grew into Kalakshetra opened inside the Society’s campus, and the Kalakshetra Foundation now holds the status of an Institution of National Importance under an Act of Parliament passed in 1993. Impart, the South Asian art-history encyclopedia, describes Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904 to 1986) as known for reviving and popularising Bharatanatyam across India.

From Madurai to the Theosophical Society

Kalakshetra’s founder page says she was born in Madurai on 29 February 1904, one of eight children of Neelakantha Sastry, an engineer who liked the teachings of the Theosophical Society. When he retired the family settled beside the Society’s estate at Adyar, where she grew up among its members, among them Annie Besant and George Arundale. She married Arundale in 1920, at 16. He was 24 years older, and the Foundation records that conservative Madras protested loudly. Arundale later became the Society’s president.

The turn to dance came through travel. On Theosophical tours she met the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, and on a voyage to Australia Pavlova had a member of her company give her ballet lessons. Kalakshetra’s account says Pavlova also insisted that an Indian dancer should learn the dance of her own country. In 1927 her brothers took her to a sadir recital by two sisters. She trained under Pandanallur Meenakshisundaram Pillai, and the Foundation adds that she is also said to have begun with Mylapore Gowriammal. The Sangeet Natak Akademi’s own citation, written when it proposed her for an honour, names the same two teachers in the order Gowriammal first, then Pillai.

The recital of 1935

The recital was part of the Theosophical Society’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, in the open-air Adyar Theatre. Kalakshetra’s founder page lists what was new. The programme was presented as a stage performance. The musicians, who until then followed the dancer back and forth, sat to one side, and a plain backdrop framed the dance. Costumes and jewellery took their designs from ancient sculpture. Impart says the move from the temple courtyard to the stage changed how Bharatanatyam was perceived and opened it to practitioners across class divisions.

The same page records two reactions to the evening. The Nobel laureate C. V. Raman, who was in the audience, spoke of grace brought down from the Himalayas to the earth of the platform, in the Foundation’s account, which also says some in Madras had threatened to boycott the event. The Sangeet Natak Akademi’s citation calls her the first dancer from outside the professional class to perform in public. ThePrint adds a qualification: Kalanidhi Narayanan had given a recital about three months earlier, though it was little publicised.

Kalakshetra: one student, a thatched room and three mirrors

Kalakshetra’s college history says she met her husband and her brother Yagneswaran in August 1935 to discuss an arts centre, and that the International Centre for Arts was founded on 6 January 1936 inside the Theosophical Society’s campus. It began under a tree with one student, her niece Radha, who later became the Society’s president as Radha Burnier. Two more students joined, G. Leelavati and A. Sarada, and classes moved into a thatched room with three mirrors, the “kannadi kottagai” that Kalakshetra still remembers.

She began buying land at nearby Thiruvanmiyur in 1945, according to Sahapedia, at about Rs 300 an acre. Sir C. P. Ramaswami Iyer laid the foundation stone on 27 December 1961, and by 7 May 1962 the institution had moved in, Kalakshetra says. The campus now covers about 100 acres beside the sea. The 1993 Act of Parliament made the Kalakshetra Foundation an Institution of National Importance, and its 2021 to 2022 annual report describes it as an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture. The Foundation runs the Rukmini Devi College of Fine Arts, which trains students in Bharatanatyam, Carnatic music and visual arts, two schools, a centre for weaving and natural dyeing, two libraries and a hostel.

Sahapedia names Yamini Krishnamurthy, Shanta Dhananjayan and Leela Samson among its alumni, and Leela Samson later directed the Foundation. The wider story of the form is in the tuput guide to India’s eight classical dances.

Dance-dramas and the weaving centre

Kalakshetra says she composed more than 30 dance-dramas, still performed from her choreography. Impart singles out a series of six pieces from the Ramayana, and Sahapedia names Rama Pattabhishekam, Rukmini Kalyanam, Kutral Kuruvanji and Shabari among the milestones. Tiger Varadachariar composed music for some of them, Sahapedia notes. The performing wing keeps these works in its repertory today. For the epic behind the series, see what the Ramayana is.

Textiles were central to the costumes and backdrops, according to Kalakshetra’s craft-centre history. It says V. V. Giri, then the Minister for Industries, opened the weaving centre on 19 September 1937, with a government grant behind it, to revive designs that were dropping out of use as cloth from Manchester mills flooded Indian markets. The Foundation says the centre also made the costumes for the dance-dramas, and that Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay began its experiments with natural dyes in the 1950s. A Kalamkari unit for hand painting and printing with vegetable dyes was set up in 1978.

What historians and dancers debate

Impart notes that she toned down the erotic element (shringara) of the repertoire and gave more weight to devotion (bhakti), and ThePrint reports the same shift. The dance had been performed by the devadasis, the hereditary temple dancers, and the anti-nautch movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had campaigned against that tradition before she began.

The dancer and choreographer Aranyani Bhargav, writing in The Hindu in 2021, argues that her reforms contributed to the exclusion of hereditary dance communities, and that the blame cannot rest on one person because the anti-nautch campaign came first. She also credits the institution with changing how dance is taught: a classroom of students learning from several teachers replaced the one-to-one bond between a nattuvanar (dance master) and a pupil. Bhargav quotes the Odissi dancer Aadya Kaktikar as saying that Kalakshetra’s format became a model for other regional forms seeking classical status, and that Odissi revivalists trained there and brought Sanskrit gesture names from the Natyashastra into their teaching. ThePrint quotes Leela Samson saying that Rukmini Devi adored the devadasis, and that descriptions of her as an opponent of them are inaccurate. Impart records that she added to reforms already begun by dancers from the devadasi community, among them T. Balasaraswati.

Parliament, honours and the Animal Welfare Board

The Sangeet Natak Akademi’s citation says the President nominated her to the Rajya Sabha in 1952. The Gazette of India Extraordinary of 26 January 1956 lists “Shrimati Rukmini Devi Arundale, M.P” among the Padma Bhushan recipients that year. The same citation notes that she served on the executive board of India’s national commission for cooperation with UNESCO.

The Akademi’s dance listing carries her name twice, under 1957 and under 1967. Impart gives the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award as 1957. The Akademi’s page does not say, in the text tuput could read, which honour the 1967 entry records, and some secondary accounts call it the Akademi Fellowship, its highest honour.

Animal protection was her second cause. Kalakshetra says she was instrumental in passing the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act as a Rajya Sabha member, and that a World Vegetarian Congress was held in India in 1957 under her presidency. The Act, number 59 of 1960, carries the date 26 December 1960. It replaced the corresponding provisions of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1890, state by state, as each part came into force. Section 4 directs the Central Government to set up a board “for the promotion of animal welfare generally”, which became the Animal Welfare Board of India. The Board’s own introduction says it was established in 1962 under that section and “started under the stewardship of” Rukmini Devi Arundale. Kalakshetra says she chaired it, and Impart calls her its first chairperson.

Kalakshetra’s founder page also says that in 1977 the then Prime Minister, Morarji Desai, nominated her to become President of India and that she declined, because the office would take her away from Kalakshetra. ThePrint repeats the account. tuput found it only in the Foundation’s own page and in press retellings, not in a government record, so it is reported here as the Foundation’s account.

She died on 24 February 1986, according to Sahapedia and The Hindu, in Chennai, says Impart. The Board’s introduction page, last updated on 2 November 2026, says it has 28 members, six of them Members of Parliament, and that members serve three-year terms.