Sudha Chandran

Sudha Chandran was born in Bombay to a Tamil family and began learning Bharatanatyam, the classical dance of south India, at three. By her mid-teens she had given dozens of performances and was being talked of as a future star. In 1981, returning with her parents from a pilgrimage in Tamil Nadu, the bus she was travelling in collided with a lorry. Her right leg was injured; at a local hospital the wound was cleaned and a cast applied, but gangrene set in beneath it. By the time the infection was recognised the leg had to be amputated below the knee. She was sixteen.

Dance seemed finished. Then she read about a doctor in Jaipur, P. K. Sethi, whose cheap rubber-and-wood artificial foot, developed for Indian labourers who squatted and walked barefoot, allowed the ankle to flex. She went to see him, was fitted with a Jaipur foot and started, painfully, to practise again, learning to trust the leg with the stamping footwork the dance depends on.

Three years after the accident she returned to the stage in Bombay. Her story was made into a Telugu film, Mayuri, in 1984, and she played herself, winning a special jury award at India\'s National Film Awards; a Hindi remake followed. She has since worked for decades as a television actress, but still dances, and is asked most often not about her career but about the leg.