V.Sambasivan

Velayudhan Sambasivan was a famous "Kadhaprasangam" artist of Kerala, India. He was born on 4 July 1929 in Chavara Thekkumbhagom in Kollam district, as the eldest son of Meloottu Velayudhan and Sarada. He had seven siblings. After schooling in his native village he joined Sree Narayana College, Kollam for higher studies where he was associated with the Communist Party of India and its student wing AISF. His gift for singing and acting earned him the name of an artist very early in his life. He started his career as a teacher but quit the job to become a full-time artiste. With his inimitable style in story-telling, he soon became one of the most popular artists of Kerala with immense mass appeal. He presented more than 50 stories on stage including Shakespeare's Othello and Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Being a member of the Communist Party of India he was arrested and imprisoned in 1975, during the Indian Emergency declared by the then regime headed by Indira Gandhi. He died of lung cancer on 23 April 1996, aged 67. V. Sambasivan received the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi Fellowship in 1980. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._Samb...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...)