 Music Bharat Nattyam's history spans over millennia with 11th century temple of Chidambaram in south India showing dance poses still performed in this style Over the centuries, Bharatanatyam remained a temple dance, danced in the sanctum sanctorum of temples by solo women dancers wedded to the deity as part of religious offerings. I always wanted a change from Bharatanatyam as it was and I always would add a little thing to Bharatanatyam also to make it a little more interesting. I get fed up with just doing the same thing every day. Menalini was also the first woman ever to learn the all-male style of Kathakali going on to win its highest accolade, the Veeraj Sringkala. So when I went home that day I decided that I would do a full Kathakali piece without the costumes to show them the power of Kathakali and how beautiful a form it is. And it was astounding. The form of Kathakali she had not deviated from but she had bared the form, taking away all the costumes, colour, makeup and what have you and you could see the strength of the form and the entire galaxy of the dancers, musicians, painters, solars, writers they were astounded what Menalini had created. Now this is the power of her contemporary thinking. This is the power that having known Kathakali as a dance form she was able to bring out the essence of the dance form in the most magnificent manner if the contemporary dance began in India. From the tradition this is where it began. From the last decades of the 19th century Rubindranath Tagore was a towering cultural figure in India and his school Shanti Nikitam was a crucible for some of the country's most powerful creators and visionaries. Spending three years with the Nobel Laureate, Menalini was greatly influenced by that. Tashirdesh, the kingdom of cards, was Tagore's protest against the stifling strictures of religion especially Brahminical Hindus. I didn't have the force that I wanted it to have. I changed it a bit and made it very strongly against all isms not only one but all isms where mostly people thought it was against communism. In fact when we did it in China they did not appreciate it at all because they were full of what Tashirdesh was and so it had a meaning for almost every kind of person or every kind of feeling that people had about isms. I was always looking for subjects that would shake people in dance and when I heard of this incident in Ramalpur I was horrified. I had heard it before cruelty to origin but I never really felt it as I did then and it was then that I decided that I should dance it and show it to people and it was then that Tagore had written a play also called Chandalika which was on the same theme and I took both of these ideas, Chandalika and my own ideas and mingled them into a dance where it showed how hurricanes were treated in our country how people killed people, their own people and that horrified me and the only way I could talk about it was to dance. By the 1980s the world was realizing the gravity of the destruction that development was causing to our environment. Disturbed by news that the Silent Valley Rainforest in Kerala was going to be partially destroyed for a idle project Murnalini created the first of many environmental pieces. In the summer of 2004 Murnalini undertook one of the biggest challenges that a choreographer can face depicting the history of Indian science through dance. It's a huge amount of work. Choreographed by Murnalini Sarabhai the concerns are contemporary as they were relevant 60 years ago or even today She also experimented the music of Beethoven or other musicians from the West-Etheta but the core remained very very Indian and that is where her genius lies. Murnalini