About
To provide comprehensive, professional training in Kathak classical dance, to facilitate the transmission of the Lucknow and Jaipur gharana traditions, and to create a platform for Kathak's development and public presence through national festivals.
Kathak Kendra, formally the National Institute of Kathak Dance, is the premier institutional home for India's Kathak classical dance tradition. It is a constituent unit of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's National Academy of Music, Dance and Drama, and is located at Bahawalpur House, Bhagwan Dass Road, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi. The institution traces its origins to 1955, when the Kathak wing was established at the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra through the efforts of Nirmala Joshi, the first Secretary of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, under the patronage of Sumitra Charat Ram. In 1964 it became a formal part of the Sangeet Natak Akademi; in July 1969 the Akademi took over its functioning and moved it to Bahawalpur House. Pandit Shambhu Maharaj of the Lucknow gharana was the founding Head of Department. The institution is primarily dedicated to Kathak, though it also offers courses in Hindustani classical vocal music, Tabla, and Pakhawaj. Since 1982 it has organised two annual national-level Kathak festivals: the Kalka Bindadin Festival and the Sharad Chandrika Festival.
The story of Kathak Kendra begins in the crisis that fell on Kathak's custodians after independence. The end of the princely states and their royal patronage system in 1947 and 1949 removed the economic foundation on which the great gharanas of Kathak had depended for generations. The Lucknow and Jaipur gharanas, whose lineages ran back through the courts of Awadh and the Jaipur state, suddenly had no institutional context for their work.
Shambhu Maharaj, one of the most celebrated exponents of the Lucknow gharana's bhava anga (expressive dimension), had come to Delhi in 1955 following the dispersal of the Awadh court. Nirmala Joshi, the first Secretary of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, understood that without institutional infrastructure, the great masters and the knowledge they held would not survive. She worked with Sumitra Charat Ram, wife of industrialist Mela Ram Bajaj and patron of the arts, to establish a Kathak wing within the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra, a cultural organisation set up in New Delhi in 1952. Here Shambhu Maharaj became Head of Department, teaching a generation of students who would go on to define Kathak's public life in the second half of the twentieth century.
In 1964 the institution became an official constituent unit of the Sangeet Natak Akademi. In 1969 it moved to Bahawalpur House on Bhagwan Dass Road in Chanakyapuri, the former residence of the Nawab of Bahawalpur, which the Government of India had allocated as a cultural campus. The National School of Drama occupies an adjacent block of the same campus.
Under the Akademi's umbrella, Kathak Kendra has trained generations of dancers, including many who became nationally and internationally recognised performers. The institution became a venue for creative synthesis across the gharanas: the Lucknow and Jaipur gharanas, which had developed in distinct courtly traditions, found a shared institutional space at the Kendra. The choreographic work Parikrama, created in 1980 by Birju Maharaj during the directorship of Keshav Kothari, used Kathak to depict the natural rhythms of all animate life, exemplifying the kind of choreographic innovation the institution has enabled.
Since 1982 the Kendra has organised two annual Kathak festivals: the Kalka Bindadin Festival, named after the great nineteenth-century Lucknow court musician, and the Sharad Chandrika Festival, focusing respectively on group and solo performances. These festivals have served as platforms for the Kathak community's most significant artistic events.
Visit & Access
Located at Bahawalpur House, Bhagwan Dass Road, Chanakyapuri. The annual Kalka Bindadin and Sharad Chandrika Festivals are open to the public. The campus is shared with the National School of Drama.
Founding & Leadership
Nirmala Joshi, the first Secretary of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, was the driving force behind the establishment of the original Kathak wing in 1955. Pandit Shambhu Maharaj (1908 to 1970), a celebrated exponent of the Lucknow gharana's bhava anga, served as the founding Head of Department and gave Kathak Kendra its initial artistic identity and lineage.
Leadership & Trustees
Initiatives & Portfolio
Primary training in Kathak classical dance at all levels, with associated instruction in Hindustani vocal music, Tabla, and Pakhawaj.
Annual national Kathak festival focusing on group performances. Named after Kalka-Bindadin, the great 19th-century Lucknow Kathak masters. Run since 1982.
Annual national Kathak festival focusing on solo performances. Run alongside the Kalka Bindadin Festival since 1982.
Kathak Kendra's cultural significance is precisely its existence as the institutional buffer between the royal patronage era and the contemporary one. Had the Sangeet Natak Akademi not created this space in 1964, and had Nirmala Joshi not acted in 1955, the Kathak tradition might have fragmented without the institutional continuity that a training institution provides. The masters who taught at Kathak Kendra in its early decades, including Shambhu Maharaj, trained a generation who have in turn trained the next, creating a lineage that is directly traceable to the formal establishment of the institution. The two annual festivals it runs are also among the most credible platforms for the Kathak community in the country.
Kathak Kendra is a constituent unit of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, not a standalone institution, which matters for anyone considering a partnership or profile. Its significance is less as an independent cultural organisation and more as the primary national training infrastructure for one of India's eight classical dance forms. Its location at Bahawalpur House, on the same campus as the National School of Drama, has created a quiet but productive cross-pollination between classical dance and theatre training in Delhi for five decades. For the Atlas, it is a critical node in the classical dance ecosystem and the most direct institutional link to the historical gharana system of Kathak.