India's Eight Classical Dance Forms, From Bharatanatyam in Tamil Nadu to Sattriya in Assam, All Have Their Own Category in the Sangeet Natak Akademi Awards

The Ministry of Culture’s Centre for Cultural Resources and Training (CCRT) lists eight classical dances: Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Kathak, Manipuri, Odissi, Kuchipudi, Sattriya and Mohiniyattam. The Sangeet Natak Akademi, India’s national academy of music, dance and drama, names each of the eight as a separate category in its dance awards, next to Chhau, contemporary dance and other traditions. The eight come from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Manipur, Assam and a northern belt that runs through Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi and Madhya Pradesh.

The eight forms and where each belongs

The Ministry of Culture’s own dance page gives a home to each form. Bharatanatyam belongs to Tamil Nadu. Kathakali and Mohiniyattam belong to Kerala, and Kuchipudi to Andhra Pradesh. Odissi comes from Odisha, Manipuri from Manipur, and Sattriya from the Vaishnava monasteries of Assam. Kathak is described there as the principal dance of northern India.

The Akademi’s award guidelines list twelve dance categories: Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Kathakali, Manipuri, Kuchipudi, Odissi, Sattriya, Mohiniattam (the spelling the Akademi uses), Chhau, Contemporary, Other Major Traditions of Dance and Dance Theatre, and Music for Dance. The Ministry’s dance page also covers Chhau of eastern India, but CCRT’s classical menu stops at eight.

The Natya Shastra, the text they share

CCRT calls Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra the earliest treatise on dance available today, a source book of drama, dance and music. It says the date is generally accepted as between the second century BCE and the second century CE. That is a range, not a fixed date.

CCRT records that the author built his “fifth Veda” by taking words from the Rigveda, music from the Samaveda, gestures from the Yajurveda and emotions from the Atharvaveda. Tradition also holds that Brahma himself composed the Natyaveda, which has over 36,000 verses.

The treatise splits dance into three parts. Natya is the dramatic element, nritya is expressive dance that conveys a theme or idea, and nritta is pure dance whose movements carry no meaning. A dancer is trained to convey nine sentiments, from love and mirth to peace. All styles also follow the older sorting into tandava, the bold and vigorous mode, and lasya, the soft and graceful one, CCRT says.

The four southern forms: Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Mohiniyattam, Kuchipudi

Bharatanatyam grew out of dancers dedicated to temples, the Ministry says, and was earlier called Sadir or Dasi Attam. The same page calls it the first of India’s traditional dances to be refashioned as a theatre art and shown widely at home and abroad. The Ministry and CCRT credit the Tanjore Quartet of the nineteenth century, the brothers Ponniah, Chinnaiah, Sivanandam and Vadivelu, with the recital format used today. A performance runs in a set order, from an invocation song and alarippu (an abstract opening piece) through the jatiswaram, the shabdam and the varnam, which CCRT calls the most important composition of the repertoire, to a closing tillana and mangalam. The music is Carnatic. The orchestra has a vocalist, a mridangam (drum) player, a violinist or veena player, a flautist and a cymbal player, and the nattuvanar, the dance conductor, recites the rhythm syllables.

Kathakali took shape in Kerala in the seventeenth century, according to the Ministry, and CCRT adds that it grew from older ritual theatre such as Koodiyattam and Krishnattam. Most plays come from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and are written in Malayalam verse. The actor never speaks. Two singers on stage give the text, drummers play the chenda, and the actor tells the story through codified hand gestures (hastamudras) and facial expression. Faces are painted by character type, green for heroes, kings and divinities and red or black for fierce characters, and male roles wear a large billowing skirt. A traditional performance starts in the evening and ends at daybreak, though today select scenes from two or three plays are staged.

Mohiniyattam is Kerala’s solo dance, named for Mohini, the enchantress form that Vishnu took in the Puranic account. The Ministry and CCRT both credit Swati Tirunal, the nineteenth-century ruler of Travancore, who composed a large part of its song repertoire. The poet Vallathol founded Kerala Kalamandalam in 1930 and, in CCRT’s words, gave the dance the dignity of a distinct classical solo style. Its movements are swaying, with no abrupt jerks or sudden leaps, and the footwork is soft. It uses 24 hand gestures, mostly from the Hastalakshana Deepika, a text that Kathakali also follows.

Kuchipudi takes its name from a village in Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, about 35 km from Vijayawada, CCRT says. Its account has the seventeenth-century Vaishnava poet Siddhendra Yogi composing the dance-drama Bhamakalapam after a dream in which Krishna asked him for a piece on the parijata flower and Satyabhama, Krishna’s queen. In 1675 the Nawab of Golconda, Abdul Hasan Tanishah, issued a copper plate granting the village to the Brahmin families who practised the art. All the actors were then men. Lakshminarayana Shastry (1886 to 1956) introduced solo dancing and the training of women dancers, CCRT says. Carnatic music accompanies the dance, and a solo recital often ends with the tarangam, in which the dancer stands on a brass plate and moves it rhythmically.

Odissi and Kathak, from the temple and the court

Odissi comes from Odisha, where the Ministry says maharis, female temple servants, performed it in its early form. CCRT adds that boys called gotipuas later trained in the art and that many of today’s gurus come from that tradition. The Ministry says the dance was remoulded as a theatre art around the middle of the twentieth century, using the evidence of temple sculpture, painting and literature. CCRT cites archaeological evidence of the dance from the second century BCE in the caves of Udayagiri and Khandagiri near Bhubaneswar, and the Natya Mandap, the hall of dance, at the Sun Temple at Konark.

The technique rests on two stances, the chowk, a square and balanced stance, and the tribhanga, in which the body bends at the neck, torso and knees. CCRT calls the sideways movement of the torso over a still lower body a unique feature of the style. The repertoire includes love songs from Jayadeva’s twelfth-century Gita Govinda and Odia poems. The dancer wears silver jewellery, and a pakhawaj (barrel drum) player leads the orchestra, CCRT says.

Kathak takes its name from katha, a story, and CCRT traces it to the Kathakars, storytellers who recited the epics. The Ministry says it possibly moved to a courtly setting in medieval India and had its finest flowering under Mughal rule. In the nineteenth century Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Oudh, was its patron. CCRT ties the Lucknow school to bhava (mood and emotion) and the Jaipur school to layakari (rhythmic virtuosity), and names the Benaras school as a third. The technique rests on footwork on the flat foot with ankle bells, and on pirouettes. A recital opens with the amad (entry) and the salami (salutation). CCRT calls Kathak the only classical dance linked with Muslim culture and the only one wedded to Hindustani music.

Manipuri and Sattriya, the dances of Vaishnava devotion in the north-east

Manipuri is anchored in the Vaishnava faith of the Meiteis, the people of the Manipur valley, the Ministry says, and the temples of Manipur are still among its main stages. CCRT names Lai Haraoba, the “merrymaking of the gods”, as its earliest form. It says the Rasleela dances date to the reign of King Bhagyachandra in the eighteenth century, who is said to have conceived the dance, its costume and its music in a dream. In the Ministry’s description the style is introverted and restrained: the dancer never makes eye contact with the audience, the movements are circular and continuous, the hand gestures are absorbed into the flow, and the footwork is never audible. Dancers wear no ankle bells, CCRT notes, and the Pung drum and the flute are the main instruments. The Akademi’s Jawaharlal Nehru Manipur Dance Academy in Imphal, founded in 1954, teaches the form.

Sattriya developed in the sattras, the Vaishnava monasteries of Assam, from the work of the saint Sankaradeva, whom the Ministry dates to 1449 to 1586. CCRT says he introduced the dance in the fifteenth century, while the Ministry says it developed in the sattras from the sixteenth, so the two pages differ on when it began. Laid-down rules govern hand gestures, footwork, costume and music, according to CCRT. The tradition has two streams, a repertoire tied to the Bhaona plays and independent numbers such as Chali, which CCRT calls graceful, and Jhumura, which it calls vigorous.

Sattriya was recognised as the eighth classical form in 2000. The dance critic Sunil Kothari, who worked on the form, wrote that Bhupen Hazarika, as chairman of the Akademi, organised a conference in Guwahati in 2000 where it was unanimously accepted that Sattriya had all the characteristics of a classical dance, and that it was recognised as one. The Akademi opened its Sattriya Kendra in Guwahati on 15 July 2008.

How the Sangeet Natak Akademi came to exist

The Akademi’s annual report says it was created by a resolution of the then Ministry of Education dated 31 May 1952, notified in the Gazette of India that June, and that it became functional the next year under its first Chairman, Dr P. V. Rajamannar. President Rajendra Prasad inaugurated it on 28 January 1953 at the Parliament House. The Akademi’s website gives 1953 as the year it was set up, which matches the opening. Education Minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad said at the inauguration: “It will be the aim of this Akademi to preserve our traditions by offering them an institutional form.”

It was reconstituted as a society under the Societies Registration Act on 11 September 1961. Two of its three constituent units teach dance, the Jawaharlal Nehru Manipur Dance Academy, which grew from the Manipur Dance College set up by the Government of India in April 1954 and became an Akademi unit in 1957, and Kathak Kendra in Delhi. The Akademi also runs the Kutiyattam Kendra in Thiruvananthapuram, opened on 27 May 2007.

Awards, Fellows and the number 153

Akademi honours have been conferred from 1952, its guidelines say, and the Fellowship, the Akademi Ratna, is the highest. The first Fellow was elected in 1954, and the Akademi says it has honoured 153 Fellows to date, with more than 1,298 artists given Akademi Awards. A Fellow receives Rs 3 lakh (Rs 300,000), a citation, a Tamrapatra (copper plaque) and an Angavastram (shawl). An Akademi Award carries Rs 1 lakh. Both are open regardless of nationality, race, caste, religion, creed or sex.

The Akademi’s Executive Board resolved on 8 October 2009 that the ceiling on Fellows at any one time could rise from 30 to 40, with the new seats filled over five years.

UNESCO’s list and the forms beside the eight

UNESCO inscribed Kutiyattam, the Sanskrit theatre of Kerala, on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, after it was first proclaimed in 2001. UNESCO’s description gives its age as more than 2,000 years and points to its use of eye expression (neta abhinaya) and gesture language (hasta abhinaya). The Akademi’s report says UNESCO’s proclamation came in May 2001, after ten years of work under the Akademi’s Kutiyattam project. UNESCO’s description adds that funding shortages have put the profession under strain.

Other dance traditions are on the same list. Sankirtana of Manipur, ritual singing, drumming and dancing in the temple-centred worship of Manipur’s Vaishnava community, was inscribed in 2013. Its India page also lists Chhau dance, Kalbelia folk songs and dances of Rajasthan and Mudiyettu, a ritual theatre and dance drama of Kerala, all inscribed in 2010, and Garba of Gujarat in 2023. The page lists 16 elements for India in total, the latest of them Deepavali in 2025.