Dancing Again

The bells tied around her ankles chimed with every step. The drum kept time, and the girl on the stage moved her hands, her eyes and her feet together, telling a story without a single word.

This was Bharatanatyam, one of the oldest classical dance forms of India. And the girl dancing it, Sudha Chandran, had been learning it since she was a small child.

Dance was not a hobby for her. It was the centre of her life.

A dancer from the start

Sudha grew up in Bombay, now Mumbai, in a family with roots in Tamil Nadu. Her parents saw her love of rhythm early and found her a dance teacher. Bharatanatyam takes years of patient training. The footwork is fast and precise, the poses are held low and strong, and every gesture of the hands has a meaning.

Sudha practised for hours. Alongside her schoolwork, she began performing on stage, and by her teens she had already given many recitals. People who saw her said she had a real future as a dancer.

The accident

In 1981, when Sudha was sixteen, she was travelling with her family in Tamil Nadu. The bus they were on crashed.

Sudha survived, but her right leg was badly injured. At first the wound was not thought to be life-changing. But it became seriously infected, and gangrene set in. To save her life, the doctors had to amputate her right leg below the knee.

She was sixteen years old, and she had spent nearly her whole life learning to dance. Now, it seemed, it was over. Visitors were kind, but most of them thought the same thing. She would have to find something else to do with her life.

The Jaipur Foot

While she was recovering, Sudha read about a doctor in Jaipur, in Rajasthan, named Dr P. K. Sethi. He had helped to create an artificial leg known as the Jaipur Foot. It was cheap, light and flexible. Unlike many artificial limbs of the time, it allowed people to squat, sit cross-legged and walk barefoot, just as people often do in India.

Sudha went to Jaipur. Dr Sethi fitted her with a new leg.

Learning to walk on it was hard enough. Learning to dance on it was something else. Bharatanatyam is danced barefoot, with deep bends of the knees and sharp stamps of the feet on the floor. Every stamp now meant pain where the artificial leg met her own. She has said in interviews that there were times when her leg bled during practice.

But she kept practising. She started again almost from the beginning, as if she were a young student. She learned how to balance, how to land, how to trust a leg she could not feel.

Back on the stage

In the early 1980s, a few years after the accident, Sudha Chandran stepped onto a stage in Bombay to dance a full Bharatanatyam recital.

The audience knew her story. Many came wondering if she could really do it. Some perhaps came out of pity, or simple curiosity. She danced the whole performance, with the same fast footwork and deep, strong poses she had spent her childhood learning. When it was over, the hall rose for her.

Newspapers carried her story across India. A girl who had been told her dancing days were finished was dancing again, on stage, in front of hundreds of people.

Mayuri

Her story reached the film world. In 1985, a Telugu film called Mayuri told the story of her life, and Sudha played herself. She had to act out the accident, the hospital and the long struggle to dance again, reliving the hardest years of her life in front of a camera.

The film was a great success and was soon remade in Hindi. Sudha won a special award at India's National Film Awards for her performance.

That was the start of a long career as an actress in films and television, which carried on for decades. But she never stopped calling herself a dancer, and she kept performing on stage.

For many people with disabilities in India, her story became a source of hope. It showed that losing a limb did not have to mean losing a dream.

Want to read more?

The film Mayuri (1985) tells Sudha Chandran's story with her in the lead role. To learn about the artificial leg that helped her dance again, read about the Jaipur Foot and the charity in Jaipur that has fitted it, free of charge, to huge numbers of people around the world.