Chitra Visweswaran

Chitra Visweswaran is an Indian Bharata Natyam dancer who runs a dance school, the Chidambaram Academy of Performing Arts, in Chennai.

She was awarded the Padma Shri, one of the top civilian honours given by the Government of India, in 1992.

Visweswaran began dancing at the age of three with her mother, Rukmini Padmanabhan, who was trained in contemporary Indian dance and Bharata Natyam. Her father was an engineer with Indian Railways, and when his job took the family to London, Chitra began to study classical ballet. Later, in Kolkata, she trained in the Manipuri and Kathak dance forms. At the age of ten, she went under the tutelage of T.A. Rajalakshmi, one of the best devadasis from Thiruvidaimarudur, who had settled in Kolkata. Her arangetram—her debut onstage performance—took place within ten months, an unusually short period, and she continued to train with Rajalakshmi for almost a decade.

At thirteen, Visweswaran choreographed the life of Saint Tyagaraja in the form of a varnam, the most demanding type of piece in the Bharata Natyam repertoire. She wanted to move to Chennai (then called Madras) after finishing school to pursue a career in dance, but her parents insisted that she complete a college degree. She earned a BA in English from the University of Calcutta while simultaneously studying dance theory and the history of dance on her own time.

In 1970, she received a scholarship for advanced study in Bharata Natyam from the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development at a time when only two such scholarships per year were awarded nationwide, compared with 25 today. She spent her four-year scholarship period studying in Chennai under Vazhuvoor Ramaiyya Pillai. Within three months, he chose Visweswaran over his other students to star in a dance drama he had choreographed. The musicologist P. Sambamurthy, the art historian Kapila Vatsyayan, and the dance critic Sunil Kothari all noted her work.

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