Prof kapila vatsyayan biography

Kapila Vatsyayan (25 December 1928 – 16 September 2020) was a leading scholar of Indian classical dance, art, architecture, and art history.
Dr Kapila Vatsyayan was one of the original Fellows of the Temenos Academy.
A life beyond categories!

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Kapila Vatsyayan

Indian politician

Kapila Vatsyayan (25 December 1928 – 16 September 2020) was a leading scholar of Indian classical dance, art, architecture, and art history. She served as a member of parliament and bureaucrat in India, and also served as the founding director of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.

In 1970, Vatsyayan received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship, the highest honour conferred by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's national academy for music, dance and drama; this was followed by the Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship, the highest honour in the fine arts conferred by Lalit Kala Akademi, India's national academy for fine arts in 1995. In 2011, the Government of India bestowed upon her the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian honour.

Early life and background

She was born in Delhi to Ram Lal and Satyawati Malik.^[1] She earned an MA in English literature from Delhi University.^[2] Thereafter, she completed a second MA in Education at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a PhD at the Banaras

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Last updated: 13-03-2019

The world of puppetry has the innocence of the child, pure and fresh, and the wisdom of the sage. For me it has always held a special fascination as a unique artistic manifestation, of the simple and the complex, the liminal space of the mysterious and the imaginative. Through the very instrumentality of distancing from real time and space, it brings home the essence of the natural and real. The diversity of puppet theatre, as also its pervasiveness in all cultures and civilisations at different periods of human history, ranging from the remote past to the most contemporary and avant garde, makes it a most powerful medium of cross-cultural, multi-dimensional communication.

Over these decades UNIMA has played an outstanding role through its various chapters in creating a global community of artists who celebrate cultural diversity and distinctiveness. In a world where inter-connectivity is crucial, it is equally crucial to sustain innumerable forms of this art which sometimes face the danger of extinction.

I am particularly happy that the first World Pup

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Ravi Chaturvedi*

The recent death of Thalia laureate and renowned dance scholar Kapila Vatsyayan at the age of 92 has left the cultural community in both India and the larger world in deep sorrow. Through her many published contributions, Dance—the soul of Indian culture—was given a meaningful, realistic and holistic perspective opening new avenues for practitioners and researchers of the performing arts.

In the year 2000, I was assigned to write an article on interdisciplinary art forms for Theatre Research International, the journal of the International Federation for Theatre Research published by Cambridge University Press. I struggled to find worthwhile material until I remembered her book Bharata: The Nāṭyaśāstra; it had totally transformed my views regarding the Natyashastra, and re-reading her analyses reminded me how she always managed to see art with fresh eyes.

Until this publication, I saw the Natyashastra as just another ancient scripture defining the art of theatre as a part of a philosophical stream. But Vatsyayan interpreted it through almost scien