Kapila Vatsyayan once said she “belonged nowhere and belonged everywhere.” She could quote Sanskrit manuscripts one moment, mimic a prime minister the next, dissect a dance as theory, then perform Kathak or Manipuri. She was a dancer, an art historian, and one of the troika of women who set about building India’s cultural institutions, along with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Pupul Jayakar.
Long before it was trendy, she embraced handlooms and khadi and though she was a mentor to many, she wasn’t one to sugarcoat.
“What he knows about Odissi can fit on a postage stamp!” she once said of a scholar, recounted author and Padma Shri awardee Utpal K Banerjee in an article shortly after Vatsyayan’s death at the age of 91 on 16 September 2020.
“In public, Kapilaji was generally impatient with people displaying shallow knowledge of classical arts; in private, she was devastating,” he wrote. “Once chatting in the lobby outside the IIC auditorium, she imitated the walk of a former Prime Minister between the two entry doors to show what she learnt from the illustrious person about ‘putting up a stiff upper lip’.”
Whether performing on stage, writing a scholarly treatise, or leaving friends in splits, Vatsyayan moved easily between worlds. Where it all came together was in the larger project of preserving India’s arts, whether through Delhi’s Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), Sarnath’s Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, or Bhopal’s National Museum of Humankind.
One of her pet grouses was the “lack of coherence” in policies that left cultural heritage “outside the pale of institutions of higher learning”. And she made her discontent known.
“Whenever I think of Kapilaji, I remember her strength. She was not afraid of anyone and had the courage to be frank in her criticism. She pulled me up on a number of occasions, saying SPIC MACAY should expand its activities to less privileged educational institutions,” said Kiran Seth, founder of SPIC MACAY, who also credited her with securing the organisation’s first government grant about 45 years ago.
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‘My ignorance was abysmal…’
Born into a family deeply involved in the nationalist movement yet open to Western thought, Kapila Vatsyayan’s artistic and academic training was nothing if not eclectic. Her mother, Satyawati Malik, was a passionate freedom fighter, and her brother, Keshav Malik, an acclaimed poet and art critic.
In Calcutta of the 1930s she learnt what was then called “Oriental dance”, a lyrical Bengali style tied to the revivalist spirit of the time, she said in a 2000 interview with dancer and scholar Uttara Asha Coorlawala. When she was about 10, Kathak master Acchan Maharaj— father of Pandit Birju Maharaj— saw her perform as a child and told her, “Bahut accha naachi ho, lakin talim ki jaroorat hai” — you dance beautifully, but you need training.
It was advice she took seriously. Over the next years she moved between Kathak, Bharatanatyam with Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai, Manipuri with Amobi Singh, and later Odissi with Surendranath Jena, treating each not just as performance but as a way of thinking.
With a Master’s degree in English Literature from Delhi University and another in Education from the University of Michigan, Kapila’s intellectual curiosity spanned both Eastern and Western traditions. Dance, though, remained a parallel track. She once called it a “totally separate life” from her scholarship, yet the two converged, especially after she returned to India from the US.
“America gave me the time, which it does even today, to ask questions both about myself as a body but also about myself as my culture,” she said. “[But] I realised that despite my extensive education, my ignorance was abysmal. One day after doing my prerequisites for the PhD degree, I decided to return to India… I felt that I was ignorant about the culture to which I belonged. I had to know it. “
She then went on to complete a PhD from Banaras Hindu University, focusing on the intricate relationship between art, dance, and culture.
Her academic work, spanning over 200 papers and 20 books, has become foundational to understanding the intersection of dance, music, theatre, and visual arts in Indian culture. Notable works like The Square and the Circle of Indian Arts and Bharata: The Natya Shastra were trailblazing efforts to synthesise ancient Indian wisdom with contemporary artistic practice, offering new insights into the relationship between different art forms.
Mentorship was famously another one of her strong suits. One of those she supported was Kathak maestro Birju Maharaj.
“It was Dr Kapila Vatsyayan who… went to Lucknow and brought Birju to Delhi and got him appointed as a young guru at the age of sixteen at Sangeet Bharati institute,” wrote dance historian Sunil Kothari in an article.
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An ‘unbounded’ institution-builder
Vatsyayan was among the architects of India’s cultural infrastructure. As the founding director of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), established in 1986, she shaped the institution into one of India’s foremost hubs for cultural exploration and scholarship. She helped set up the Central University of Tibetan Studies as well, and was chairperson of the India International Centre’s International Research Division.
She had reach inside government too, advising Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and Rajiv Gandhi on cultural and educational policy. She served as Secretary in the Ministry of Education and, later, as a Rajya Sabha member in 2006 and again from 2007 to 2012.
She wasn’t averse to locking horns. She once clashed with her mentor Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, pushing for a dance festival at Chidambaram and arguing it would rejuvenate ritual rather than commercialise it. That contested idea is today the annual Natyanjali festival.
Rajeev Sethi, founder-chairman of the Asian Heritage Foundation, described a relationship full of ups and downs with Vatsyayan in a tribute video, from playing croquet to artistic disagreements.
“My encounters with Kapilaji were numerous and mostly volatile, right from the days of the Festivals of India that she had first conceived before [Pupul Jayakar] took over,” he recalled. “Over the years she was easily hurt and sometimes bitter about everything going wrong. But all through five decades of knowing Kapilaji, I remained in absolute awe of her astute scholarship, her austere lifestyle… how one regrets never having seen her dance on stage or on a recorded film.”
Though known for her academic rigour and occasional outbursts, she reportedly had a light-hearted side, including a love for cooking and a brief appearance in the Hindi film Swara Mandal (1997). And she was simultaneously spiritual and cerebral in her approach to dancing. She viewed it not merely as an art form but as a sacred journey and pathway to self-awareness.
“I did not come to Indian dance by growing up with it as a family tradition. I think I got the essence of each of these traditions without being bound by the conventions of these traditions,” she said in 2000. “I became an unbounded bounded person.”
(Edited by Asavari Singh)