CHENNAI: Bharatanatyam’s first woman ‘nattuvanar’ (conductor of dance ensembles) and guru of Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, KJ Sarasa, passed away here on Monday morning following a heart attack. She was 74. The final rites are expected to be held on Wednesday.
Having established a dance school, Sarasalaya, more than five decades ago, Sarasa has groomed some of the best-known dancers in the State today, including Shobana and Swarnamalya. Sarasa has also conducted more than 1,500 recitals and several ‘arangetrams’, including those of Vyjayanthi Mala and the Ragini-Lalitha-Padmini trio. Her other students include actor Kamal Haasan, dancers Raghuram and Urmila Sathyanarayan. Sarasa was also one of the two prominent dancers under whom Jayalalithaa trained during her childhood (the other being KN Dandayuthapani Pillai, Sarasa’s cousin), before her arangetram at the age of 12.
The Chief Minister condoled the demise of her guru. Stating that Sarasa had contributed immensely to the art form, Jayalalithaa said Sarasa’s demise was a great loss to those involved in performing Bharathanatyam.
Among the titles Sarasa had to her credit are the Swarnakalasam Award, Natya Ratna, Nrutyaratna, Natyakala Chakravarthi and Natyakala Sigamani. She was the first woman ‘nattuvanar’, Jayalalithaa recalled.
Dancer from Family of Musicians
Karaikkal Jagadheesan Sarasa hailed from a family of musicians, with her father Jagadheesan Pillai being a popular nagaswaram artiste and her grandfather Rajagopalan the ‘asthana vidwan’ of the Sani temple in Tirunallar. Sarasa learnt dance under a distant relative and dance doyen Vazhuvoor Ramiah Pillai, whose school of dance, Bani, she later popularised. Despite being trained, Sarasa stuck to teaching dance rather than performing, on her guru’s advice. She was also a classical vocalist who trained with Valliyoor Gurumurthi, Ramanathapuram Krishnan and Rajagopala Iyengar. She had also had a stint with choreographing for films, but gave it up after working on less than a dozen films. In 1960, she established dance school, Sarasalaya, which later expanded to Coimbatore. Kutrala Kuravanji, Silappadhigaram, Adithya Hridayam, Sakuntalam, Krishna Parijatam and Kunrakudi Kuravanji are some of her popular dance dramas.