Mothers by Daughters & Others - My mother, My dance - Jothi Raghavan

 
My mother… my dance… I can’t separate one from the other.  I dance because my mother wanted me to. I am living her dream.  As a child, I resented having to learn dance which ate into my playtime... Little did I know that this would be the greatest gift that she gave me.  Now, I cannot imagine my life without dance. Bittersweet indeed.

Born and brought up in Srirangam in a conservative family, my mother could not learn dance formally. But dance was her passion. She got married early and settled into the role of a wife and a mother before she was twenty, but her love for dance kept growing. She finally had the opportunity to learn dance from Guru Vazhuvoor Ramaiah Pillai at the ripe old age of twenty-one! She performed her arangetram which was a great accomplishment for those days. Once I had my arangetram, we performed together as “a mother and daughter team.”


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