Chennai’s famous Kalakshetra Foundation, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, has been accused of enabling a culture of sexual abuse by several former students and staff. While Kalakshetra has denied these allegations against the institution, as well as a faculty member who has been accused of harassing several students, TNM spoke to two survivors who have recounted their experiences during their time at the institution. We also spoke to six staff members of Kalakshetra, all of whom attest that the environment in Kalakshetra is toxic.
The two survivors who spoke to TNM have named an assistant professor of dance, Hari Padman, in their allegations. One of them, Meera Krishna, was a student at Kalakshetra between 2015 and 2019. Meera said she had to discontinue her ‘Post Diploma’ in Bharatanatyam because of the hostile environment created by the teacher. Meera filed a complaint against Hari Padman with Kalakshetra’s internal committee (IC) against sexual harassment on February 6, 2023, but Kalakshetra which has been busy denying the existence of any formal complaint has neither taken up her complaint nor acknowledged it. It is to be noted that while the Sexual Harassment at the Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 (PoSH Act) says organisations can take up complaints of incidents which have happened in the preceding six months at most, organisations following the spirit of the law have taken older complaints seriously when there appear to be patterns of predatory behaviour — something that Hari Padman’s accusers have pointed to.
“I was sitting under a tree in the Kalakshetra campus, sometime in July 2019, when Hari Padman who was passing by stopped near me,” said Meera, who is a Malayali from Kerala, as is Hari Padman. “He spoke to me in Malayalam and asked if I’d like to come home. I was puzzled, and I said no. Hari Padman followed up with ‘no one will know’, and a sexually suggestive gesture. I said no again,” Meera said. She faced the repercussions of this denial for the next several months, until she decided to quit Kalakshetra altogether, she said.
Meera recalled an incident that followed when she was very ill. “I was running in and out of the bathroom, but I went to class because Hari Padman had warned me not to take leave even while sick,” said Meera, “He had said that I must observe the class even if I did not dance.” Out of the blue came a barrage of insults when Hari Padman asked her who she was “sleeping with in the bathroom”, she alleged.
“It broke my spirit. I kept crying throughout the 45 minutes of him screaming and shaming me in front of the entire class and he then stormed out. I began hating dance. I wanted to go home and never return,” Meera said.
A witness to this incident spoke to TNM attesting to it and has also written a letter to the Kalakshetra IC on March 23, in which she said, “Meera was unwell for a few days and she couldn't attend college. One day she didn't attend the prayer and the first class of Vocal. Later, she came to the dance class. At that time Mr. Hari Padman had asked her why she was late. The conversation went on for more than 45 mins in Malayalam…I can vouch for a heated argument.”
“Every time I made a minor mistake in class, like with my posture, Hari Padman would ‘reprimand me’ with body shaming comments,” Meera said, recounting his references to ‘protrusions’ in her body. “He also used expletives, especially against my father. For some reason, this was considered normal in the institute. I could not take it,” Meera said. She had lost her father to cancer in late 2016, and abusive references to him in Malayalam were very triggering for Meera.
Meera comes from a lineage of performing artists. Her maternal grandfather Chirakkadavu Gopalan Nair was a celebrated Kathakali dancer, and her mother Radha Anilkumar runs the Ambady Dance Academy in Thiruvananthapuram in neighbouring Kerala, where Meera was raised. “I got admission at a famous college in Chennai for an English Literature course, but six months into the course, I realised I belonged in the world of dance,” she said.
Meera began her Diploma in Bharatanatyam, a four-year undergraduate course, at Kalakshetra in 2015. “Hari Padman was not my instructor then,” she said. “Everyone praised his work and I genuinely believed that perhaps I could benefit from his guidance. But I was allotted another tutor in my undergraduate years. He became my instructor later in 2019 when I joined the post-graduate course. I did not want to return to Kalakshetra at that point as I had heard about his teaching methods, particularly his use of abusive and vulgar language. But I enrolled for my family’s sake, and because few students get admitted to the Post Diploma course,” Meera said.
A Post Diploma is an obscure yet coveted four-semester degree in the insular world of Bharatanayam, which allows one to teach credentialed as a Kalakshetra graduate.
Hari Padman’s creation of a toxic atmosphere — which is one of the well recognised ways in which sexual harassment plays out — made her quit the course, and made her almost hate dance, Meera said.
Though the IC has not taken up Meera’s complaint, Hari Padman has learnt about her letter to the director — who also heads Kalakshetra’s IC — and has reached out to her classmates asking them to vouch for him. How Hari Padman got information about Meera’s complaint is something Kalakshetra needs to explain.
A second Kalakshetra alumna, referred to in this article as Person X to protect her identity, recalled a similar experience. Person X was a student of Bharatanatyam at Kalakshetra between 2012 and 2018. She recounts that there was a tacit understanding that students were expected to be ‘pally’ with Hari Padman and socialise with him, she said, but she was not comfortable with having any intimacy with her teacher.
“I was harassed and humiliated by Hari Padman in front of my batchmates and later even my students, using expletives involving my mother,” Person X told TNM. “I verbally complained many times to Revathi Ramachandran (the director of Kalakshetra Foundation). She would assure that action would be taken, but everything remained the same, and perhaps only got worse,” she said.
Recounting a particular instance where Hari Padman put her in an unsafe situation, Person X said, “In 2018, Hari Padman asked me to perform for Kalakshetra at an external venue. I agreed because really, there is no option for any student to refuse such things. He specifically asked me to go alone, but thankfully, I managed to take a friend along. The institution gave me a car and a driver, and when I reached the ‘venue’, I realised it was a big house in Chennai’s ECR road — a private function. The audience was a bunch of drunk men and a handful of women. They kept making me uncomfortable while dancing and I halted the performance mid-way and came back.”
“I raised this with my class teacher and the coordinator of the program, but nobody took any action,” she said, breaking down as she spoke. “I had no idea why Hari Padman would send me to a place like that. I was scared and humiliated. Nobody reached out to me from the institute despite my raising the issue verbally,” she said.
TNM spoke to six current staffers at Kalakshetra Foundation on the condition of anonymity, who alleged that the culture at Kalakshetra, and the students’ isolation from the outside world, enables abuse. Since its inception, Kalakshetra has had strict moral codes, particularly for women students. From how much skin a woman can expose under her saree, to whether she can wear make-up, everything is surveilled, teachers and students said.
Kalakshetra is situated in a sprawling 100-acre campus in south Chennai, where four institutions cohabit — the Rukmini Devi College of Fine Arts (RDCFA); the Besant Arundale Senior Secondary School (BASS), a Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) affiliated English medium school; the Besant Theosophical Higher Secondary School (BTHS), a state government-aided Tamil medium school; and the Craft Education and Research Centre (CERC), a unit of Kalakshetra where handwoven silk sarees and other textiles are produced.
Until the late 2000s, Kalakshetra admitted students who had finished Class 10 into its four-year undergraduate course, a practice that was stopped under the directorship of Leela Samson who served between 2005 and 2012. The admission qualification was shifted to Class 12 graduates. Faculty members pointed to the fact that until recently, a diploma graduate was often legally a minor.
Kalakshetra’s geography isolates it from the city, and most students doing their fine arts courses live on campus. Famous artists are the gurus at the institute, and this means the power differential between students and teachers is huge, said staffers TNM spoke to. The institute was taken over by the Union government in 1993 following an Act of Parliament, and the Central Civil Service Rules 1964 govern the conduct of its staff; however, in practice, a feudal setup of informality and functioning continues, they said.
It was in late December 2022 that accounts of sexual harassment at Kalakshetra began to surface online, following a now redacted Facebook post by Bharatanatyam dancer Leela Samson, the then director of the institute. The IC at Kalakshetra, established as per the Sexual Harassment at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act of 2013 (PoSH), appeared to be proactive, swinging into action inquiring on its own without a formal complaint (called suo motu in legal parlance) into the allegations. The committee recently exonerated Hari Padman, calling the allegations “rumours” meant to sully the institution’s reputation.
While organisations are mandated to create a safe environment for women, and can therefore proactively look at concerns of predatory behaviour, the PoSH Act requires a written complaint for the IC to open an investigation. In this context, legal experts say Kalakhetra’s quick suo motu inquiry and consequent exoneration of Hari Padman look like an eyewash.
The statement on Kalakshetra’s website threatened legal action against students and faculty should they “spread rumours or gossip”. Speaking to TNM about Kalakshetra’s gag order, advocate Sudha Ramalingam said that no organisation can deny students the space to voice their experiences.
In early January this year, soon after the sexual abuse allegations surfaced, the serving director Revathi Ramachandran assembled the staff, IC members, and students of Kalakshetra at its main auditorium, and asked them to speak up. Hari Padman was also present at this meeting. Staffers who TNM spoke to said no student came forward then, as there was no privacy; several students and staff saw this as an exercise in intimidation, the staffers said.
In the last week, several developments have taken place in the case. The chairperson of the National Commission for Women, Rekha Sharma, asked the DGP of Tamil Nadu to look into the allegations at Kalakshetra on March 21st, only to ‘rescind’ the letter on March 26, reportedly after a complainant withdrew her complaint. The Tamil Nadu DGP meanwhile has asked the Commissioner of Police, Chennai, to look into the matter. Kalakshetra has issued another statement denying the allegations.
There is no word from the foundation however on why they have not acted or even replied to Meera’s complaint against Hari Padman. Meanwhile, TNM has learned that one more formal complaint is pending with the IC, against a different faculty member. There is also at least one more letter written by a faculty member to the IC raising concerns about Hari Padman’s conduct.
TNM reached out to Revathi Ramachandran for her response. She said the institute is discussing the issue and will soon release a statement. On March 24, Kalakshetra Foundation released a statement that reiterated its earlier position exonerating Hari Padman and calling the allegation “rumours.”
Hari Padman refrained from comment citing ‘limitations’ as an employee of Kalakshetra. He pointed to the recent news report of Revathi Ramachandran meeting TN’s DGP and said that the appropriate authorities to comment on this would be Kalakshetra’s management, even if the specific allegations of sexual abuse had been made against him.
“To learn from this esteemed foundation is everyone’s dream. But my dreams were shattered by some people. However, I would like to get justice for the two years I lost and all the humiliation I had to deal with,” Meera said in her complaint to the IC, “And also I am ready to come and talk about this issue anytime.” She quit dancing altogether in the years 2019 and 2020, returned to Thiruvananthapuram, and took up a job as a TV presenter for a local channel there.
“Many of my closest friends from Kalakshetra know that there is harassment and abuse on campus. But everyone is scared to go on record fearing the implications. Kalakshetra is a revered institution and has a huge clout within the art community. I am speaking about my experience, and naming my abuser now because I am not scared anymore,” Meera said.
The Commission has come to a conclusion to close the matter as the victim has denied sexual harassment while she was inquired by the IC committee. @sharmarekha
— NCW (@NCWIndia) March 25, 2023