Mallika Sarabhai

Activist, Artist, Environmentalist, Filmmaker, Performer, Social entrepreneur, Writer/Editor

Mallika Sarabhai, Artist and Activist Educated as an economist and a business manager, Mallika Sarabhai is one of India’s best-known Bharata Natyam and Kuchipudi dancers. She has taken her work and that of her company Darpana to over 90 countries of the world and to the farthest parts of India. A multi-talented creative individual, she celebrates positive reaffirmation of images of womanhood. She has used every medium – dance, theatre, television, film, writing and publishing – for her work, winning recognition in India and abroad. In recognition of her efforts to promote social justice through the arts, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as part of the 1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize campaign. She has received numerous awards including the Knight of the Order of Arts & Letters and the Chevalier des Palmes Academiques, from the Government of France, and several awards from the Government of India. Mallika Sarabhai is director of Darpana Academy of Performing Arts, a centre for the arts where the focus is on the use of arts for social change. In 1982 she founded Darpana for Development to develop performance as a language for change and JANAVAK, the voice of the people, to record and preserve folk and tribal culture. She played the lead character of Draupadi in the international theatre production of The Mahabharata by world-renowned director Peter Brook. She spent five years performing the play in French and English, and playing the role in the film and TV versions. On her return to India in 1989 she became deeply involved in creating her own contemporary dance vocabulary beginning with her first solo theatrical work, Shakti: The Power of Women. From 2000 to 2002 she was CEO of TARA, a TV channel dedicated to using mainstream genres of programming for activism. She founded Darpana Communications in 2001 to harness the potential of TV to change attitudes and fight social prejudice. As dancer, actress, choreographer, writer, social entrepreneur and instigator of community projects, Mallika Sarabhai has fearlessly challenged audiences to sit up and think, and to realign themselves to critical questions of gender bias, communal hatred, the environment, corruption, violence and more.

Life

Doing good, helping others, making a difference are in fact wonderfully selfish acts. More than making things better for others, they make a huge difference to us, to the way we feel, the way we look at ourselves, to our levels of satisfaction and happiness. That should be reason enough for all of us to do it all the time.

India's greatest strength is that while rooted in a 5000 year old culture, the tree that is India, has branches all over the place. Rather than reject one for the other, we must use one to make the other meaningful. Rather than copy the West, mistakes, selfishness, blindness and all, we must forge a new modernity that is rooted in the wisdom and experience of the past but with the farsightedness and tools of the modern world and modern thought. Of all the countries in the world, we alone have the power to do this. Le tus not blow this huge and exciting opportunity towards a better tomorrow for all, by being copy cats of selfish self interest and mediocrity.

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