Soorya Krishnamoorthy

Nataraja Krishnamoorthy, known across India as Soorya Krishnamoorthy, died on 23 September 2026 at a private hospital in Thiruvananthapuram. Kerala Kaumudi and other outlets reported that he was 75. Born on 11 April 1951 in Kottayam, Kerala, to engineer T. Nataraja Pillai and C. Saraswathi Amma, he trained as an electrical engineer at TKM College of Engineering in Kollam, graduating in 1972, then joined the Indian Space Research Organisation as a scientist and engineer.

In 1977, while still at ISRO, he founded what became the Soorya Stage and Film Society and the Soorya Festival. What began as a film society grew into one of Asia's largest cultural platforms, presenting classical dance, music, theatre, cinema and workshops in Thiruvananthapuram and through chapters in India and abroad. Limca Book of Records recognised Soorya as a landmark cultural society and named Krishnamoorthy Man of the Year in 2003 for his work in the arts. He later took voluntary retirement from ISRO to devote himself fully to the movement, insisting that young performers should have free or low-cost stages rather than ruinous arangetram costs.

He directed light-and-sound and stage productions, wrote plays and books, and scripted the 2011 Malayalam courtroom drama Melvilasom. Public roles followed: three terms as director of the Kerala State Film Development Corporation, service on National and Kerala State Film Award juries and the NFDC script committee, work on Doordarshan and Union Culture Ministry advisory bodies, and a term as chairman of the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi. In 1996 he received the President's National Award for Stage Craft and Direction. Tamil Nadu later gave him the Kalaimamani. In 2023 Kerala conferred the Kerala Prabha, its second-highest civilian honour. Ustad Amjad Ali Khan nominated him for a Padma award in 2016.

Colleagues remembered an organiser who brought artists such as Amjad Ali Khan to Kerala audiences and who treated homemakers and students as central to a film and theatre public. He campaigned to protect poet Sugathakumari's house Varada and kept an open black-box theatre for beginners. By September 2026 he was preparing the next Soorya season when illness returned. He had recently sought treatment at KIMS in Thiruvananthapuram. News of his death on 23 September brought tributes across Malayalam cultural circles for a scientist who spent nearly fifty years making art a daily civic habit rather than a rare event.

Soorya Krishnamoorthy is remembered as the builder of a festival culture that outgrew any single stage: engineer, director, screenplay writer, and tireless host of India's performing arts in the capital of Kerala.