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ART AND
MEDICINE
Students of Arathi School who have studied for 5-6 years to earn their ankle bells which is about the midpoint of their training in Bharathanatyam, a classical dance form.
Mine is to choose the Color
of the Rainbow to Slide Down
What is Yours?
By Rajam Ramamurthy, MD
Simply saying I dance, would be an understatement of my life, way through medical school. I would quietly go into a room and be
the past 35 years. I learned, I taught, I created and stretched, I ached trying out movements I saw in movies.
and cried, I exalted at the shear movement of my body. Can I share
with you, who is thumbing this magazine, perhaps with your feet When I arrived in Chicago in 1967 for my pediatrics training and
up on a desk, sixth cup of coffee in one hand and a waiting room later a fellowship in neonatology, there was no time for anything ex-
full of patients, the exaltation and recharge that dance provided me cept being in the hospital by 7:30 a.m. and working till you finished
and the women who shared the journey with me? all your work. An intern had no day off. Life really gathered speed
with romance, marriage and the arrival of two precious bundles as
It happened one evening at a social gathering. We were four young I danced around them all my waking and few disrupted sleeping
physicians in our 30s, each with a daughter around 5 or 6 years. The hours. In 1975, I heard of a dance teacher who had started a
conversation drifted towards dance, specifically ‘Bharathanatyam,’ ‘Bharathanatyam’ school in Chicago, one of the first in the country.
one of the ancient dance forms of India. All of us loved to dance How irresponsible to leave the children and go to dance. Little did
and all of us grew up in India at a time when dance was denied to I know that I should have carved that one hour for myself? Then
us. India had just attained independence. Waking up as though from again, I got swept away in the move to San Antonio, Texas. This is
a long slumber were the arts. Dance and music, sacred arts, practiced where the stars configured favorably. In 1981, five women, four
by a community of ‘Deva Dasi,’ literally meaning the one in love physicians and a computer programmer, started the first Indian
with god, was the only skill the women in this community possessed. dance school in San Antonio. Our daughters and us studied this an-
Gone was the status as royal entertainers along with the Maharaja’s cient art from a teacher from Dallas who came once a month and
and their kingdoms as the British Raj’s voluptuous appetite dug into instructed. We the mothers held a class every Friday and to this day
every spear of Indian life. The Devadasi’s slowly deteriorated into a this tradition continues.
community of courtesans. This was so long ago, but the stigma that
it left on dance made it taboo for families to allow their daughters Any dance is a total body exercise, more so Bharathanatyam which
to even learn the art. I for one was born with bells around my ankles, is precise and demands movement of every part of the body includ-
so my mother would say, and remember dancing from age 4 all the ing your eyes. When our teacher retired, we mothers continued to
teach. The youngest age at which we enroll a student is 5 years.
26 San Antonio Medicine • July 2017
