The maestro who passed away on January 17 brought a chiselled form of kathak to the modern proscenium transcending all ‘gharanas’. Moreover, his grasp of the essence of his dance vocabulary enabled him to communicate across the north-south divide in India and globally.
Kapila Vatsyayan: The Visionary Who Defined Indian Aesthetic Theory
Kapila Vatsyayanâs vision was driven by a necessity to develop a terminology to be able to examine Indian art in its own art history.
Kapila Vatsyayan (1928-2020). Photo: Bharat Tiwari
In 2011, I was commissioned to curate an exhibition on ‘The Body in Indian Art and Thought’. The show was put on the road in 2013 with a grand opening by the president of India and the king of the Belgians at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Only five years earlier, however, the very same venue had hosted another exhibition of Indian art called ‘Tejas’, curated by Kapila Vatsyayan.