We are extremely thankful to our readers who welcomed our previous number of Nartanam (Il, 2), a special issue on the Kuchipudi maestro, Shri Vedantam Laxminarayana Sastry. Our efforts have been duly rewarded. The need to focus on our past masters who blazed the trail seems much more needed today than it was half a century ago. The strong foundations they had laid for their art had resulted not only in perpetuating it for the future generations, but also helped innovators to take off from where they stopped. Nartanam would like to dive deep into our archives and bring to life the creative treasures that they left for us. To know about them and their work is itself an educative process.

We are also happy to bring to our readers of this issue the expertise of great artists and critics whose researches will strengthen the art and its practitioners in no less measure than our understanding of the earlier masters. That our age lives up to the expectations of the best students of dance is more than evident in these articles for, in them, we find a thorough foundation of the classical tradition enriched by an innovative mind.