Sonal Mansingh biography

 Good evening everyone. Today I am going to speak about a daughter of Mumbai who was able to prove herself as the proud daughter of Odisha through her amazing, heart-touching Odissi dance. She is none other than Sonal Mansingh.

Sonal Mansingh was born on April 30, 1944, in Bombay which is now Mumbai, India. Along with being a dancer of various Indian classical dance forms like Manipuri and Bharatnatyam, which were her dance styles from her childhood, she was a graceful Odissi dancer, another Indian, classical dance form of our wonderful state, Odisha. Besides being a dancer, she had a few other professions like being a teacher, a researcher, a choreographer, and also a social activist.

In the early 1960s, her professional dance career began. In 1965, she started training under Odissi guru Kelucharan Mohapatra in Cuttack. She did not limit her study while exploring various elements of the Oriya culture and other dance forms like chhau and Kuchipudi.

She also went under pervasive training in abhinaya which is also known as gesture expression in English. Sonal Mansingh was trained in Hindustani and Carnatic classical vocal music. She was also proficient in other languages like Sanskrit and German.

For her work, she was the recipient of many awards like the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1987, Padma Bhushan, India’s third-largest award, in 1992, and Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-largest award, in 2003.

Sonal Mansingh is one of the famous personalities, who helped to spread awareness about Odissi dance by not only loving it but also performing it nationally and internationally and also winning various prestigious awards. We all are proud of her.