‘The auditorium literally rose from the ashes’

He,along with the institute’s corporate patrons,were felicitated at an event to celebrate the auditorium completing 60 years. popularly known as Shanmukhananda hall,the auditorium is run by the sabha and the 15,000 th performance featured a dance recital choreographed by Bharatnatyam exponent VP Dhananjayan. Dhananjayan’s group from Chennai comprised dancers and musicians,who displayed traditional and folk dance forms from every region in the country.

Dhananjayan’s performance was followed by speeches by the Governor and president of the sabha,V. Shankar. While Sankarnarayanan fondly remembered with pride his compatriots from Kerala being the first performers,others shared delightful anecdotes involving the late PM Jawaharlal Nehru,MS Subbulakshmi and Lata Mangeshkar.

The sabha was founded by the Tamil Brahmins in Mumbai in the late 1940s in a bid to fill the void of cultural events in the city. Starting with kutcheris,organised in pandals in 1952,an auditorium was constructed by 1963,when Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister.

“Panditji insisted the country’s commercial capital should have something like this. The irony was that just 15 days after he visited one of our events,he passed away,” Shankar said.

The auditorium has been one of the revered platforms for cultural events for six decades. Even though it was constituted for promoting fine arts,it didn’t restrict itself to just that. “We diversified from Carnatic to other classical music concerts,” Shankar said. Over the years,it has hosted legendary American violinist Yehudi Menuhin,Bollywood premieres,(Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam) being the first,Russian and French ballets and even stand-up comic acts by Russel Peters.

The auditorium — which has a capacity of around 2,800 and boasts of state-of-the-art acoustics — was gutted in 1990.

Barring its four walls,everything was destroyed. “The auditorium literally rose from the ashes. We have invested crores in rebuilding it,” Shankar added.