Padma Subrahmanyam

Padma Subrahmanyam is a dancer, choreographer, composer, teacher and scholar of Indian dance. She was named for the Padma Vibhushan in 2024 in the field of art, from Tamil Nadu ^[1].

Dance and research

She was born in February 1943 ^[2]. She heads Nrithyodaya, the dance institution founded by her father in 1942, and is a trustee of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts ^[2].

Her doctoral research on the karanas, the dance units described in Bharata’s Natyashastra, compared the ancient text with temple sculpture ^[2]. From that work she developed her own style, which she calls Bharatanrityam, along with a way of teaching it ^[2]. Her citation describes it as a revival of the pan-Indian classical technique, the marga, alongside the regional styles ^[2].

Composer and author

She composes the music for all her productions, which draw on texts in languages from Sanskrit and Tamil to Bengali and Kashmiri, on subjects from the Vedas to the freedom struggle ^[2]. Her Doordarshan series Bharatiya Natyasastra (1992) and the documentary series Karana Ujjivanam, made with the IGNCA, brought her research to a wide audience ^[2].

She designed the karana sculptures for the Uttara Chidambaram Nataraja temple in Satara, and later found that they matched ninth-century carvings at the Shiva temple of Prambanan in Indonesia ^[2]. This led her to found the Bharata Ilango Foundation for Asian Culture, a research centre with a museum of Asian performing arts ^[2].