A Brief History

In 1949, a few years after being married to Vikram Sarabhai, the young Bharata Natyam and Kathakali dancer Mrinalini settled down in Ahmedabad.

 The city was a thriving commercial and burgeoning industrial centre. Historically, it also had a vibrant folk culture, since for centuries Ahmedabad has been an important trade centre where people from all over the world met, mingled and often settled. However, at the time of Darpana’s founding, the performing arts as a profession for the educated elite was unthinkable. These activities were seen as only for the lower classes, the nachwalis and gavaiyyas. What could a brilliant young dancer do here?

But by 1949 it had become apparent to Vikram that Mrinalini needed to create and educate a new audience in Gujarat that would appreciate and demand classical dance. That same year, Darpana as a teaching institution for Bharata Natyam and Kathakali was born. Though Mrinalini’s professional dance group was regularly receiving invitations to perform outside Gujarat and outside the country, the inflow of students to her Academy at first was meagre. For the first ten years, friends and a few young girls from the upper-class families of Ahmedabad came. By 1959, the first four Gujarati students of Mrinalini’s completed their graduation in Bharata Natyam and joined the group. Perceptions started changing of dance as a career for a local girl.

In 1959, the Gujarati actors Kailash Pandya and Damini Mehta, backed by some famous figures from literature, asked Mrinalini to give a home to Gujarati theatre, which at that time was much in need of an infusion of new ideas and inspiration. The Darpana theatre department was born. Three years later, in 1962, India’s famous puppeteer, Meher Contractor, also persuaded Mrinalini to start a puppet department in Darpana.

Over the next 15 years all of the departments grew; regular performances and an influx of new students each year kept all the departments very busy. The theatre department started encouraging Gujarati playwrights to write original work for Darpana’s performance group to perform, and also began a ten-year project to resuscitate the local folk theatre form, Bhavai, and convinced the government to set up a school to train youngsters in this form in Visnagar. During this same period, the puppetry group at Darpana undertook an extensive project to revive the nearly lost form of Andhra shadow puppets – the only shadow puppets to cast a colored shadow. They researched the intricate process of the puppet making, translated original scripts from Telugu to Hindi and Gujarati and created numerous new plays. The puppetry group also ran hundreds of workshops to train teachers in the use of puppetry as an educational tool, often working closely with other government and non-governmental agencies.

Meanwhile, the dance group continued its string of successes, setting a trend in contemporary issue-based choreography and generating a new demand for Indian classical dance across India and throughout the world.

In 1977, Vikram and Mrinalini’s daughter Mallika, fresh from University with a Ph.D in Organizational Behaviour, took over as Director of the Academy.