Indu Mitha: A lifetime devoted to the art of classical dance

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Article below republished from the Friday Times

The Hand That Held The World: A Tribute To Indu Mitha (1930–2026)

She built her own version to survive; choreographing in Urdu when Sanskrit and Tamil meant nothing to the children, and ultimately proving the art’s right to exist on that soil.

Indu Mitha, whom we called Nano, passed away on August 31, 2026, in Dublin, at the age of ninety-six. She spent nearly seventy years keeping a dying art alive in a country that had little room left for it. But no award or citation ever captured what I remember best: the frown that gathered on her face when a room full of eight-year-olds could not tell their left foot from their right, and the smile that broke through moments later, along with her legendary, chest-deep “O-hoooo.”

I was not yet six the first time I met her. I was a small, nervous child hiding behind my mother’s dupatta while Yameema Khala, her daughter, interviewed us for admission from a tiny office in the foyer of a grand old house that served as an elementary school. The school, Mazmoon-i-Shauq, was in a class of its own, centered around world political history, comparative cultures, literature, and the performing arts. Nano turned around and smiled at me. I only burrowed deeper into the dupatta.

By eight, I was one of a small flock of children gathering on cold Islamabad mornings to say our salaam to Dharti Maa before we dared dance upon her, inside that converted 1960s drawing room in F-8, the beautiful, affluent neighborhood in the heart of Islamabad that Nano had transformed, through sheer force of will, into something between a shrine and a classroom. We fluttered about with no sense of direction at all until what we remember as the day of the hair ties. Nano’s palm hit her forehead with an audible smack. Her “O-hoooo” rattled the windowpanes. Then she disappeared and returned holding a small bag as though it contained state secrets.

Those were hair ties in two colors—red and green. “Green on your left. Red on your right,” she told a room of baffled eight-year-olds, her scowl barely hiding the laughter behind it—a laughter that nearly always won in the end. In a few minutes, we all had red headbands on our right wrists and green ones on our left. That’s how she color-coded our sense of direction. I am twenty-seven now, learning, embarrassingly late, to drive, and at every intersection I still murmur, “Red is right, red is right,” a small habit left behind by her. But she is no longer here to hear it.

What she was doing in that dancing room was never simply teaching children how to move their arms and feet. Bharatanatyam is a temple art, born in South India and danced for centuries in Sanskrit and Tamil before Hindu deities. To keep it alive in Pakistan, a country carved out of the very Partition that had uprooted her own family, in an Islamic Republic where anything perceived as too Indian or too Hindu could invite suspicion or close doors, was no small thing.

It was a quiet act of defiance, repeated day after day for nearly seventy years. She built her own version of it to survive here, choreographing entire pieces in Urdu when Sanskrit and Tamil meant nothing to the children in front of her, translating not just language but the very right of this art form to exist on this soil at all. She started this work after she moved to Pakistan following Partition and carried it through the dangerous times under military dictators, especially the formidable Islamist dictator Gen. Zia. But I witnessed her navigating the grey years of Musharraf’s martial law and the raw aftermath of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. By the time she stopped teaching, she was one of only two people left in the entire country still carrying this tradition forward.

There was nothing incidental about that number. It was the true cost of what she carried, and she carried it without ever once making a spectacle of the courage it took. Underneath every exasperated daant, every reluctant scolding, was that same fierce insistence: that we understood what we had been handed and what it had cost to survive. She never once let the chaos outside her dancing room touch the floor where we danced.

At ten, still hopeless with my own left hand, I was enrolled, against Nano’s better judgment, in an after-school kathak class made up entirely of grown women, several of them my mother’s own friends. I sat among dancers decades ahead of me in the art, completely out of my depth. My father then added harmonium and tabla to my evenings, taught by an ustad who worked closely with Nano. This was, to put it mildly, a hard sell in middle school, where those instruments counted for nothing. “Guitar or drums?” friends would ask when I mentioned music lessons. “Neither, tabla and harmonium,” I would admit, and watch their faces fall into a polite, confused grimace.

Every evening at six, my father collected me from the floor of my old school, where I sat cross-legged trying, badly and earnestly, to coax a thumri out of hands too small for the job. Years later, he told me that one such evening he found Nano standing in the dark behind the door, listening. When he moved to greet her out loud, she pressed a finger to her lips and tilted her ear toward the door, asking him without a word to simply listen with her.

He never forgot what it meant to him that a maestro of her stature would stand unseen in the dark just to hear a small girl try. When he told me this, I only shrugged and said, “She does that all the time.” It made me nervous sometimes. Other times, it was the very thing that carried me through. I feared she found me hopeless. Instead, I learned much later, she had told my parents the opposite.

And yet I cried and pleaded until my parents finally gave in. I never went back to tabla or harmonium, and with that small, stubborn victory, I lost, without realizing it, my last real thread to her. I saw her only occasionally after that: at a lunch when Yameema Khala was visiting from abroad, or when invited by her granddaughter Ria, a dear friend at the time, where Nano would drift through the cold rooms in the evening, forever adjusting her shawl.

Writing this now, turning these memories over the way one turns over an old photograph, I can hardly believe the privilege of having been anywhere near her at all—one of countless children she claimed as her own, though none of us shared her blood.

Her frown was never really a frown. It was a mother’s worry wearing the costume of discipline. Her daants were love letters written in a language we were too young, at the time, to read. And her “O-hoooo,” which I still hear some evenings before sleep, was the sound of a woman who had built, against every obstacle her country and her century placed before her, a small room where an entire tradition was allowed to keep breathing.

She is survived by her three daughters, including Yameema, whom I had the privilege of learning from at Mazmoon-i-Shauq, the school she founded, and her two sisters; by her grandchildren; and by generations of students who still, in some unguarded moment, reach instinctively for a green tie or a red one.

Nano, I have finally learned my left from my right. I only wish I could turn around and tell you myself.

Rwail Sirmed works in Behavioral Health Quality Management in Washington D.C. 

This article was first published in The Friday Times and is reproduced here with permission. 

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