Surya Auditorium on 23rd September 2026 hosted an audience of more than 100 members for an afternoon that moved fluidly between classical performance and profound cultural reflection — a lecture-demonstration on Pancha Kanya by Padma Vibhushan Dr Sonal Mansingh. The five women at the centre of the session — Ahalyaa, Taara, Kunti, Mandodari, and Draupadi — are figures most members had encountered before, in fragments, through mythology told in passing.
Dr Mansingh’s treatment gave them something considerably richer: context, complexity, and a framing that positioned each woman’s choices as expressions of autonomy and fearlessness rather than simply plot points within larger narratives centred on men. Her lecture-demonstration format meant the afternoon was never purely academic. Dr Mansingh moved between spoken interpretation and classical dance, embodying moments from each woman’s story with the physical vocabulary of a performer whose career has spanned decades at the highest levels of Indian classical art.
That combination — scholarship given form through movement — gave the audience an encounter considerably more immersive than a conventional lecture could have achieved.
Central to her framing was the concept of Shakti, the Divine Feminine Energy that Dr Mansingh positioned as the unifying thread connecting all five women, however different their individual circumstances.
Ahalyaa’s endurance, Taara’s wisdom, Kunti’s resilience, Mandodari’s moral clarity, and Draupadi’s fierce assertion of dignity were each drawn forward as living expressions of a strength Dr Mansingh insisted has never left Indian womanhood — only been forgotten, at times, by the women carrying it. The collaboration behind the afternoon — Prabha Khaitan Foundation, BP Halwasiya Foundation, Chalchitra Rangmanch, and Ahsaas — Women of Lucknow, alongside FICCI FLO Lucknow — reflected a shared commitment among Lucknow’s cultural institutions to platforms of exactly this depth.
For FLO Lucknow specifically, the afternoon reinforced a conviction the chapter has returned to throughout the year: that cultural engagement is not separate from women’s empowerment, but one of its most powerful expressions. Members left Surya Auditorium having encountered ancient stories made newly, personally relevant — a reminder that the strength being discussed on stage was never confined to mythology alone.