Indu Mitha (1929-2026): A Tribute Beyond Borders : An Indian Remembers
I was in the United States when she died. The news came late to me. A small message forwarded on WhatsApp. "Indu Mitha passes away in Dublin." I checked the date. 31st August 2026. She had died three days earlier, while visiting her daughter in Ireland, and I had missed it. I searched social media. Nothing. No trending hashtag, no obituary threads, no tribute from cultural ministries, no news channel breaking in. The world that can spend a week mourning a film star paid no tribute to her. That silence itself is a statement about our times.
I know my delay. I know this tribute comes late. But it lurked in my mind even during travel and during my return flight ; this image of an old woman in Dublin who had once been a young girl in Lahore. So I write this now, under jet lag, as early as I possibly can, because it needs to be done. Some obligations cannot wait for perfect timing.
I write this as an Indian. An Indian paying tribute to a Pakistani dancer who remained culturally Hindu, married to a Muslim general, who dared a military dictator. That sentence alone is why she must be remembered.
She was born Indu Chatterjee in Lahore in 1929, before Lahore became Pakistan. Her father, Gyanesh Chandra Chatterjee, was Professor of Philosophy and President of Government College, Lahore ; that great institution that produced eminent men like Allama Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, N.M. Rashid, Khushwant Singh, Krishan Chander, Lala Lajpat Rai, Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, Zafarullah Khan, Dev Anand, K.L. Saigal, Pran Nevile, Nobel Laureates Har Gobind Khorana, and Abdus Salam, and many more. Her family were Bengali Brahmins who had embraced Christianity some generations earlier, part of that luminous, much-ignored Bengali intelligentsia that gave us both rationalism and art. Her elder sister Uma would marry Chetan Anand, the pioneer of Indian cinema. This was not a narrow household. It taught its daughters to think, not to bow.
Partition wrenched her family to Delhi. In that wounded, refugee-filled city, Indu found two destinies. The first was Bharatanatyam. At a time when the dance was being rescued from colonial contempt as mere "nautch", she studied under Vijay Raghava Rao and Shrimati Lalita, and then travelled to Madras to sit at the feet of Rukmini Devi Arundale at Kalakshetra. Rukmini had given back to Bharatanatyam its sanctity as a temple art. Indu understood that profoundly. For her, it was never entertainment. It was Sadhana , the Bhagavad Gita in movement, with hastas and abhinaya and aramandi as its grammar.
The second destiny was a man. Captain Aboobaker Osman Mitha. AO. A tall, handsome Memon officer from Malabar Hill, Bombay, from one of the most affluent trading families of British India. A graduate of the Indian Military Academy, Dehra Dun, who had opted for Pakistan. Muslim. Reserved. His later motto to the SSG, which he founded, would be "Be proud of your poverty."
They fell in love in Delhi. In 1947, that love became illegal by geography. The border was drawn in blood to ensure such loves would not happen.She was a postgraduate in philosophy from Delhi university.
What Indu did in 1951 is one of the greatest love affairs in the modern history of the subcontinent, and we do not teach it. Against fierce opposition from her Bengali family, twenty-two years old, she boarded a train alone, crossed the newly hostile border, arrived in Karachi, and married him. She did not cross as a refugee. She crossed as a lover. She left India for Pakistan not for ideology, but for a man.
Indu is great granddaughter of the priest of Kalibari temple of Kolkata who converted to Christianity .She did MA (philosophy) from Delhi university in 1951, and taught at the Government College for Women, Rawalpindi after moving to Pakistan.
And this is the scholarly crux : she did not convert. She was a Bengali Christian of Brahmin heritage who married a Gujarati Memon Muslim and remained culturally Hindu. Her nikah was performed, but her soul was not bartered. Her art remained Hindu. Her repertoire remained Krishna and Shiva, in Sanskrit, with the bindi, the temple jewellery, the Kanjeevaram sari and the ghungroo. In the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, as the wife of a rising general, she lived openly as a Hindu cultural practitioner. Her house was a paradox: his Pakistan of discipline and duty, hers of art and devotion. They made it one house.
She followed him to every cantonment : Quetta, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Cherat , and everywhere she taught, gratis. Not for money. For duty. Over 2,000 students over six decades, from daughters of prominent Shia families of Lahore to girls and boys from the katchi abadis of Islamabad. She believed dance was a gift.
Then history punished them both.
Major General Mitha, the founder of the Special Service Group, the man who commanded the Pakistan Military Academy and who held the Hilal-i-Jurat for East Pakistan, was made a scapegoat for 1971. He was never court-martialled. He was never given a field general court martial to defend himself. His retirement was announced on national television. His medals were stripped, his pension withheld for seven years, his home placed under surveillance throughout the Bhutto years. From legend to pariah overnight. A friend who visited him in his enforced retirement near Islamabad wrote, "At the end of a tumultuous life, all he wanted was a room to sleep in, one to write and eat in — a space to walk, reflect and gaze across the fields to the distant hills." He died in December 1999, managing a friend's farm to survive. Islamabad's elite, which had once courted the glamorous Mithas, vanished.
Indu stayed. Her dance became their dignity, their resistance, their income.
Then came 1977. General Zia-ul-Haq seized power. The Hudood Ordinances of 1979 came into force. The Zina Ordinance, the Law of Evidence, the Qisas and Diyat laws — women became half-witnesses, dance was declared vulgar and un-Islamic, music was banned from PTV, female performers were pushed off stage. Bharatanatyam, a Hindu temple dance performed in Sanskrit, was, in the eyes of the state, obscene, Indian, and blasphemous.
Every other dancer stopped, fled, or rebranded her work as "aesthetic movement" or "physical exercise." Indu Mitha dared Zia-ul-Haq.
In a small living room in Rawalpindi, while Zia's morality police enforced his Nizam-e-Mustafa outside, a sixty-year-old woman tied her bells and taught Bharatanatyam. She called it Bharatanatyam. She did not hide it. She taught the shlokas, then quietly asked friends to translate them into Urdu so her Muslim students would know they were stories of love, not idolatry. To teach Bharatanatyam in Pakistan when Islamic laws were fully operational, when public flogging was a reality, was not art. It was civil disobedience. It was courage of a kind we rarely see. Zia had tanks and jails. She had bells. The bells won.
This is where her daughter, Tehreema Mitha, completes the circle and gives this tribute its "beyond borders" meaning.
Tehreema was her first disciple, her child and her shishya, born of a Muslim father and a Christian-Hindu mother, embodying in one body the composite culture of undivided India. Indu trained her in the Vazhuvoor bani with uncompromising rigour. Only five students in her entire life ever completed their arangetram, because Indu was a purist. Tehreema was one of them.
But Indu knew Pakistan under Zia could not give her daughter the depth she needed. So she made the same painful decision her parents had once feared , she sent her child across the border. Tehreema went to India in the 1980s , the decade of Siachen, of Brasstacks, of the most hostile India-Pakistan years , on a Pakistani passport, daughter of a disgraced Pakistani general, to learn a Hindu dance at its source. She trained in Chennai and Delhi with gurus who remembered her mother as a young girl. India welcomed her without a question. No visa officer could understand that this was not a Pakistani coming to India, but a granddaughter coming home to her art.
Tehreema later moved to the United States and founded the Tehreema Mitha Dance Company in Washington, D.C. There, she became the diaspora keeper of her mother's legacy, creating works about Partition, about exile, about being Muslim and Hindu in one breath. She dances today as Pakistani, Indian, American, Memon, Brahmin, Christian , all at once. In Tehreema, her mother's impossible marriage still dances.
I quote from Maneesha Tikekar’s book “ An Indian’s Sojourn in Pakistan .. Across The Wagah Border “
“One day I saw Indu Ji’s disciples performing at Islamabad Club auditorium.The small auditorium was jam packed . Late comers had no place to enter .It appeared that entire elite of islamabad were at the auditorium.Fashionable women had found a rare opportunity to air their Sarees. Indu Ji’s disciples performed pure dance forms like Allaripu , Jatiswaram, Tilaba and Varanam. The whole ambience was dance and music .I too wondered if I were inside Shanmukhnanad Hall Mumbai or at Islamabad . It was a unique opportunity to witness Arangretam in Pakistan.I felt surprised that they did not make mention of Krishna by name instead they mentioned Maakhan Chor . According to Indu ji , she has to make hundreds of compromises to keep Bharatnatyam alive in Pakistan.This is true. Though public dance performances are not banned currently in Pakistan, it is a challenge to keep dance alive. For this Sheema Kirmani uses Urdu , Persian and English poetry in her Odissi performances .She also uses Sufi poetry for Geet Govindam and Radha Krishna .”
That is why, as an Indian, I am sad. This sadness that comes when we realise we have lost a proof. Political science tells us Partition created two exclusive identities. Indu Mitha's life disproves it empirically. She was legally Pakistani, culturally Hindu, married to the founder of Pakistan's commandos, teaching Hindu temple dance to Muslim girls under an Islamist dictator, whose daughter trained in India and flourishes in America. What model of nationalism explains her? None. Only love and passion does.
She chose love twice. In 1951, when she chose AO over country. And in 1977, when she chose dance over safety. The first cost her family. The second could have cost her freedom. She never regretted either.
In the British tradition, we speak of the examined life. Hers was the examined life in movement. She taught us ,Indians and Pakistanis alike , that a foot stamping in devotion needs no visa, and a hand forming a mudra needs no passport.
Social media may have paid no tribute. The news may have come late to me in America. I may be writing this under jet lag, in a rush, with tired eyes. But I write it because some people must be remembered, not for their country, but for their defiance of the very idea that art needs a country.
This last line I dedicate to you, Indu Mitha: Guru, lover, rebel, Indian at heart, Pakistani by fate, dancer beyond borders.
"You danced when it was forbidden to dance. Rest in dance.Rest in peace."
(Avtar Mota)
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