Meenakshi Gurukkal is the oldest known practitioner of an ancient Indian martial arts called Kalaripayattu, which she has been studying for nearly 70 years! The 75-year-old Meenakshi, who has earned the title "Gurukkal" or respected teacher, has also taught Kalaripayattu since she was 19 years old and currently teaches over 150 students at her school near Calicut in the southern Indian state of Kerala. There, she welcomes girls and boys from all castes: “Gender and community are totally irrelevant,” she says. “What matters is age. The earlier you start, the more proficient you are.”
Kalaripayattu was popular in Kerala for hundreds of years but was strongly discouraged by colonial rulers who viewed the assorted weapons used by practitioners, including flexible blades, fist daggers, shields, and spears, as threatening. Following Indian independence, interest in Kalaripayattu was revived, which is when Meenakshi’s father took the then six-year-old girl and her sister to a Kalaripayattu school in the late 1940s. “There were only a handful of girls in our class. But my father wasn't bothered,” she remembers. “He was determined we learn Kalaripayattu.” Meenakshi turned out to be particularly gifted, so her father encouraged her to continue studying past puberty, when most girls stopped attending classes. She later married Raghavan Master, a fellow Kalaripayattu practitioner who had faced caste discrimination in his own studies; together, they taught at their own school which they made open to everyone.
When Meenakshi isn’t teaching, she gives demonstrations and performances; “Nowadays, apart from teaching, I practice only when I have a show,” she says, although she maintains a demanding schedule of over 60 demonstrations a year. All four of her children also learned Kalaripayattu, beginning at age six like she did, and her son Sajeev is now also a Gurukkal. She is proud of the role that her family has played in the resurgence of this traditional art. “Now it's a way of life for us,” she says. “I will practice Kalaripayattu for as long as I physically can.”
