Sitara Devi – Great Classical Kathak Dancer

Sitara Devi (b. early 1920s on a Diwali day) is an Indian dancer of the classical Kathak style of dancing.She has given performances in several other countries, including at the Royal Albert Hall, London; and the Carnegie Hall, New York.She was born in Kolkata (then Calcutta) on the eve of the Indian festival of Dipavali, and her exact year of birth is not known.Being born around Dipavali, she was named Dhanalakshmi (nicknamed Dhanno).By the time Sitara had turned ten, she was giving solo performances, mostly during the fifteen-minute recess during movies.Her dancing is very energetic and well researched. She has developed her own niche style of dancing drawing from the treasure trove of themes, poetry, and choreography collected by her father, as also creatively analyzing and assimilating the environment around her: each and every gait and step of a village belle or a veiled peasant woman. She has many times emphasized the tandava aspect, displaying graceful movements with vigor and vitality.She combined the elements of two schools of kathak, which had developed in Banaras (in the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh) and Lucknow, the northern part of the state, then called audh. She represented a lost age when kathak used to be performed for whole night.she has been conferred a number of awards, including Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (1969) and the Padma Shree (1973), Kalidas Award (1995) and Nritya Nipuna. However, to her, her greatest award is the recognition she received from Tagore. After observing one of her performances, when Sitara Devi was only sixteen years old, she was described Nritya Samragini (that is, the queen empress of dancing) by Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, the Noble laureate.However, she refused to accept the Padma Bhushan award, declaring, “it is an insult, not an honor”, and as a report from the Press Trust of India quoted her saying: “is this government not aware of my contribution to Kathak? I will not accept any award less than Bharat Ratna.”She also learnt the Russian ballet, and some more dances of the western world. With advancing age, her dancing activities have diminished, and she is working on a compiling a book encapsulating the researches done by her father and her in the field of dancing, especially in kathak style of dancing.
To many the octogenarian Sitara Devi is a living legend and she has been popularly known as “kathak queen.” Over the years, she set her own style, and has inspired many generations of artists and audience.