In Dance of Freedom, Leela Samson distills the sweeping history of Bharatanatyam from its temple origins through colonial-era suppression and nationalist reform to its vibrant global presence today
Eminent dancer and choreographer Leela Samson’s association with Bharatanatyam spans more than five decades, beginning with her first lessons at the age of nine under the watchful eye of Rukmini Devi Arundale at Kalakshetra in Chennai. From those early days of training in the rigorous Kalakshetra style, she has grown into one of the foremost exponents of the dance form.
Samson has carried Bharatanatyam across the world stage, nurtured students, crafted new choreographies, guided India’s cultural institutions with a steady hand, stepped before the camera as an actress in recent years, and written with the quiet authority of a scholar.
Samson’s career has been shaped not just by her craft on stage but also by her administrative acumen. She served as Director of the Kalakshetra Foundation between 2005 and 2012, stewarding her alma mater during a crucial period. She later became Chairperson of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, and subsequently the Chairperson of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC).
Mapping milestones
Her recent book, Dance of Freedom: A Short History of Bharata Natyam (Aleph), is a slim, lucid volume of about 80 pages. Its compact size belies the wealth of information it reveals. Samson sketches the long, complicated arc of the dance form, from its devotional and ritual contexts in temples, through its flourishing in royal courts, its decline and stigma under colonial morality, and finally its reinvention for the modern stage.
That she has condensed this vast and multi-layered history into a concise narrative is no small feat, and she does it with admirable clarity. The result is a primer that works both as an accessible introduction for the uninitiated and as a thoughtful refresher for seasoned rasikas (aesthetes).
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Samson is uniquely suited to this task. As a Kalakshetra alumna, she inherited a training that prized discipline, elegance, and proportion. Her performances, marked by clarity of line and restraint of gesture, reflected the Kalakshetra stamp. Those same qualities flow into her prose: unhurried, precise, never given to excess. Her long apprenticeship under Rukmini Devi also taught her reverence for tradition alongside the courage to edit and refine, as well as artistic curiosity and adaptability to change.
Dance of Freedom works as a ‘short history’ that carefully selects milestones and turning points in Bharatanatyam. Samson outlines how the art was transformed under different patrons and power structures, showing how colonial suspicion and nationalist revival each left their mark. Under colonial rule, temple dancers were vilified and the hereditary devadasi system was branded immoral, leading to the loss of patronage and the near-erasure of their communities from public life.
In the early 20th century, Indian reformers and nationalists, eager to rescue the art from stigma, reimagined Bharatanatyam as a vehicle of cultural pride. This ‘revival’ brought the dance out of temples into proscenium stages and middle-class drawing rooms, making it respectable for new generations of women performers.
Samson traces the history of the events and notes figures such as E. Krishna Iyer and Rukmini Devi Arundale, who were central to this reclamation, and she points to the way distinctive regional banis — like the Pandanallur, Vazhuvoor, and Thanjavur styles — shaped the vocabulary and aesthetics of the modern form.
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She neither romanticises nor sensationalises: when she notes that the reform of Bharatanatyam under nationalist revival often meant sanitisation and standardisation, she states it without rancour, but also without glossing over the paradox. Dance of Freedom maps the broader historical canvas on which such reforms were staged. She gestures to a layered chronology: the devotional origins of Sadir within temples, its flourishing in the courts of Nayak and Maratha rulers, its discredit and decline under Victorian morality, and its 20th-century revival under cultural leaders who institutionalised the art through schools and sabhas.
By including both the old repertoire of varnams, padams, and javalis (forms of compositions in Carnatic music) and the stylistic stamp of different banis, she shows how Bharatanatyam is both ancient and modern, traditional and reinvented, shaped at every step by shifting religious, social, and political forces.
Foregrounding artistic questions
What makes Dance of Freedom especially engaging is Samson’s dual voice as practitioner and scholar. She explains technical terms with clarity, without lapsing into jargon. A newcomer will find helpful orientation in her crisp accounts of what an adavu (foundational step) is, how abhinaya (art of expression) differs from acting, and why the margam (traditional, structured sequence of dance items performed during a recital) is structured the way it is. At the same time, she brings lived experience to discussions of music, language, and poetry, showing how Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit compositions weave through Bharatanatyam’s repertoire.
Samson’s career as a choreographer and leader of the ensemble Spanda also informs the book’s perspective and the same spirit guides this history: respectful of lineage, yet open to the possibilities of renewal. Samson acknowledges and questions the shadows of caste, class, and gender that haunt the form while still foregrounding the essential artistic questions of what constitutes excellence, how pedagogy shapes aesthetics, and when innovation earns its place.
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At times, the brevity of the book makes one long for more: a deeper dive into the politics of repertoire, or an exploration of the nuances of regional banis. Yet the sparseness works as a doorway rather than a labyrinth, a guide that invites readers into the subject rather than overwhelming them with detail.
For readers encountering Bharatanatyam for the first time, Dance of Freedom offers a demystifying chart. For those already immersed in the tradition, it offers a sober, finely balanced account that resists simplification. Samson writes with the confidence of a performer who has nothing left to prove and the generosity of a teacher eager to share.
If Rukmini Devi: A Life, a biography of her guru by Samson, gave us a portrait of the architect of modern Bharatanatyam, Dance of Freedom offers us the floor plan: spare, functional, and elegant.
It is the kind of book one can gift an inquisitive teenager after an arangetram, to a curious parent, or to a sceptical friend who believes Bharatanatyam is only about glittering costumes. They will finish it with a sense of time, lineage, and artistry and, most importantly, with a desire to see the dance again, this time with sharpened eyes and attuned ears. In that lies the book’s accomplishment: it doesn’t close the conversation, it begins it.
