Who is Sujata Mohapatra, the dancer who keeps Odissi breathing?

Stone taught her how to curve without breaking,
Light taught her what to keep unsaid.

In the glance before a gesture,
In the lift of a chin that has seen both love and surrender,
A low conch inside the ribs, counting in eights,
Until the room remembers to breathe.

EdexLive honours Sujata Mohapatra, Devi of Nritya.

What moves is refined, not changed.

What rests is devotion learning to stand.

—

On stage, there is a moment when motion becomes statue and feeling becomes light. Sujata Mohapatra has spent a lifetime finding that moment and enlarging it. Trained for nearly two decades under Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra, she speaks Odissi with a clarity that feels inherited and earned.

Her body moves as if memory itself had taken choreography, each torso bend and wrist curve carrying the weight of a lineage and the ease of someone who has translated that weight into song.

Her art is shaped by an older poetic world. The verses of Jayadeva and the presence of Krishna live in her abhinaya; they surface in a look, the hush of an arm, a sculptural pause that insists on attention. The result is music made visible, devotional feeling held in the precise logic of form.

Critics have noted the statuesque quality of her poses, the whisper of the torso, the poetry of minute facial motion. Those are qualities she preserves at Srjan, where she teaches and where the school’s repertory still carries the filigree of Guruji’s choreography.

Sujata has moved beyond the studio to stages across the globe, carrying with her the technique and the text she inherited. She has been honoured by peers and institutions, a recognition that includes the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award.

Yet awards are a countable measure beside the longer work she does: training the next generation, refining a stance so that even small changes — ardha chauka instead of a wider square — become instruments of control and subtlety. She insists on that discipline because she believes precision yields lyricism.

There is a pedagogy in her footsteps. She teaches the posture that steadies the body and the discipline that steadies the imagination. She choreographs pieces that are at once classical and alive, placing old poems into bodies that remember daily life as well as myth.

Her students carry those pieces into new rooms and new audiences, and in that quiet transmission the form endures.

Sujata Mohapatra’s gift is both preservation and invention. She is a living hinge between past and present, a dancer who keeps a language fluent. When she performs, Odissi appears as something immediate and necessary, a way of saying what ordinary speech cannot hold.