A Profile: Rasa collab

There are some things you don’t realize you took for granted until you move away from them.

Game nights with family. Your favorite food stall. A concert you can walk into on a whim, or a festival that fills an evening. For the co-founders of Rasa Collab, it was the ease of moving from one sabha to another with friends, watching dance and music and perhaps even leaving with a small keepsake. Sometimes, art is simply part of the world around you. 

Ankita and Moneesha met in 2022 at Navatman. Ankita from Bombay and Moneesha from Chennai connected on their combined love for the arts and the nostalgia for the festivals they grew up around in India. 

Rasa Collab began with something small enough to carry home: enamel pins. Designed by Moneesha and made in India, the objects were intended as small reminders of festival season, the kind of things that might hold a memory long after an evening has ended. They partnered with existing events to sell their products and eventually opened an Etsy shop.

Since then, Rasa Collab has grown beyond those first keepsakes. Today, Ankita and Moneesha teach Bharatanatyam and host cultural events.

Listening to Ankita and Moneesha talk about hosting, I found myself thinking about how much happens around a performance that an audience never sees. A stage and an audience are the visible parts, but art also needs trust, care, and people willing to make room for it.

Their events have brought together a diverse range of performers from individual artists like Padmashri Dr. Narthaki Nataraj, groups like Aayana, and even teacher-student groups like Divya Nayar and her students Sayuja and Niyathi. What struck me was their desire not to fit everyone into one idea of what an artist should look like. They spoke about being clear about expectations and giving artists the flexibility to shape their own experience. Rasa’s vision is not limited to established or easily marketable artists. They want to make room for more people and more kinds of work.

Perhaps that is what collaboration really asks of us: to remember that an art form does not exist alone. It needs the artist, but also the audience, organizers, students, teachers, and the communities that keep returning to it.

While both Ankita and Moneesha continue to teach at different organizations, they have also started their own school. They wanted to create a space where Bharatanatyam could be learned with the rigor and patience they experienced themselves. Rather than moving quickly through the basics in pursuit of a performance, they want to give students time to build a foundation and connect with each of them individually.

A reassuring idea in a world that often asks us to move quickly and show results.

Ankita and Moneesha don’t have a five-year plan for Rasa, at least not one they feel the need to put into neat numbers. The vision is expansive, but for now, they are taking it one gathering at a time: an artist, an audience, a student, a collaboration.

Maybe that is enough of a vision for now: to create a place where someone might walk in for an evening of dance or music, discover an artist they hadn’t known before, and leave with a little more than they came with.