Indu Mitha

Indu Mitha was born Indu Chatterjee in Lahore in 1929, into a Bengali Christian family of Brahmin heritage that had converted to Christianity. Lahore was then in British India. Her father, Gyanesh Chandra Chatterjee, was a professor of philosophy and president of Government College, Lahore, and she grew up among that city's academics. An exact calendar day of birth has never been published. Reports of her death called her 97. Wikipedia records the age as 96 or 97, which is the honest range when only the year is known.

Partition moved the family from Lahore to Delhi. She took an MA in philosophy from Delhi University in 1951. In Delhi she learned Bharatanatyam from Vijay Raghava Rao and Shrimati Lalita, and modern expressional dance from the choreographer and actress Zohra Sehgal. She continued at Sangeet Bharat and later with S. V. Lalita. A 2009 BBC profile said she came under the tutelage of Lalitha Sastri, one of the earliest students of Kalakshetra, the southern Indian school founded by Rukmini Devi. A 2026 memoir in The Friday Times also names Rukmini Devi among her first teachers. The documented line is Kalakshetra training through Lalita or Lalitha, plus Zohra Sehgal, not a second or third tradition.

In 1951 she married Captain Aboobaker Osman Mitha, a Mumbai Memon and Indian Military Academy graduate, against both families' wishes, and moved back to Pakistan with him. The differences were religion, language, food, and the fact that she was a trained Bharatanatyam dancer with film-world relatives: her sister Uma had married Chetan Anand. After marriage she largely stopped dancing in public, because a serving officer's wife performing was frowned upon. Her husband rose in the Pakistan Army, commanded what became the Special Services Group, served as Quartermaster General, and left the army after 1971. He died on 1 December 1999. He is documented here as her husband. This page is not his profile.

In the years after his retirement she returned to teaching in earnest. Her first post was at Lahore Grammar School. Early shows were private: all-women gatherings, military functions, Red Cross charity events, and the All Pakistan Women's Association. She later gave about one show a year for private audiences. During the presidency of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, dance was treated as haraam, and a no-objection certificate was required for performances. She told critics that if they did not expect her to perform in public, she did not expect to do so. She kept teaching anyway.

She built a Pakistan version of the form rather than importing a temple repertoire unchanged. She did not know Tamil, Telugu, or Sanskrit, the languages of most traditional Bharatanatyam songs, so she wrote her own lyrics in Urdu and choreographed them. BBC quoted her in 2009 on having only a couple of photographs from her training in India, enough to give local tailors what they needed to stitch the dresses. She and her daughter Tehreema later brought a costume from India so local tailors could copy the cut. She missed the mridangam. She told the BBC that its beat was better than her heart beat. An early public breakthrough was an Urdu dance drama on the life of Amir Khusrau.

She ran the academy Mazmoon-e-Shauq (also spelled Mazmoon-i-Shauq), a house-school in Islamabad that mixed dance with literature, history, and comparative culture. Students remember a converted drawing room in F-8, a salaam to Dharti Maa before anyone danced, and her method for children who could not tell left from right: a green hair tie on the left wrist, a red one on the right. She taught girls from prominent Lahore families and children from katchi abadis in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, often without a fee. Named pupils include Amna Mawaz Khan. Wikipedia also records her as a faculty member at the Rawalpindi campus of the National College of the Arts.

She argued that the art should not stay locked inside India or the temple. She told the BBC that the art of Bharatanatyam should not be confined to India and its temples alone, and that if that happened it would only serve to harm the art. She thought Bollywood music was a greater threat to the form than Zia's ban had been, and still said it would survive in Pakistan and beyond. A Dawn interview in 2008 was headlined with her line that dance is thought and feeling. In January 2017 Dawn quoted her view that the future of classical dance and music in Pakistan was very bright.

By her nineties she was one of only two widely cited Bharatanatyam exponents still carrying the tradition in Pakistan. The other name often set beside hers is Sheema Kermani, a different dancer, associated with Odissi, not the same person. In August 2020 the President of Pakistan conferred the Pride of Performance for her services to the fine arts. Dawn reported a 90th-birthday tribute at Alhamra in Lahore on 1 March 2020, danced by Tehreema with Amna Mawaz and Iftikhar Masih. About a decade before her death she retired from regular teaching, having already stopped performing. Her farewell at the packed Pakistan National Council of the Arts auditorium in Islamabad, silver hair and a black sari with a gold border, is the scene former students still describe.

In 2020 the short documentary How She Moves, directed by Anya Raza and Aisha Linnea, followed her as a teacher of about 90 preparing students for a final recital. She later wrote to Dawn from a hospital bed, in April 2021, that the film was the filmmakers' expression of their ideas, in complete contrast to her own ideas, and that it should not be taken as a representation of her, her work, or her students. The directors said the film had been released with family consent and was their interpretation, not an ethnographic record of her style. That disagreement belongs in her record. It does not cancel the teaching.

She died on 31 August 2026 in Dublin, after a brief hospitalisation, while visiting her daughter Yameema. The cause has not been made public. Resting place and funeral details were not published in the notices used here. She is survived by her daughters, named in a Friday Times memoir as Yameema, Tehreema, and Raheela, by sons-in-law and grandchildren, and by generations of students. Tehreema, based for years with the Tehreema Mitha Dance Company, is the pupil most often named as carrying the choreography forward, including work the two of them made together, such as Aye ree maa.

What she left is not stadium fame. It is a method: photographs turned into costumes, Urdu set to a South Indian rhythmic grammar, a school in a drawing room, and a line she repeated in more than one form, that the future of this dance in Pakistan was still open if someone would teach it. For nearly seventy years, that someone was her.

This page is for Indu Mitha, born Indu Chatterjee, the Pakistani Bharatanatyam teacher. It is not a page for Sheema Kermani, Nahid Siddiqui, or Nighat Chaudhary. It is not a page for her sister Uma Anand, and it is not a page for Major General Aboobaker Osman Mitha.