Esther sought out formal instruction from a local dance teacher. By the time she graduated from high school in the 1910s, her passion for dance, now well-established, led her to engage a local man (a Russian immigrant) to teach her ballet. Soon, the pair was performing a revue of "international" dances at local cabarets and small theaters around Minneapolis. Using the stage names "Rita Cassilas" and "Todi Ragini" Sherman spent her nights performing an array of Russian folk dances and self-styled Greek-and Egyptian-themed pieces, and her days studying Indian history and culture at the University of Minnesota at St Paul (most likely as a non-matriculating student). From then on, she was known, onstage and off, as Ragini Devi (although in India, she never passed for anything other than a Westerner—albeit one with the "instincts and attitudes of an Indian"). and, travelling to the Kerala, after she received an invitation from the Maharaja of Travancore to dance in the Arts Festival. She got an opportunity to meet poet Vallathol. She became the first woman to study
Kathakali at the legendary
Kerala Kalamandalam. It is here where she met
Gopinath, the Kathakali dancer from Travancore, who agreed to be her dance partner in her tours. She was eager to join the young nationalism-inspired effort to revive and reinvent Indian arts in a national tour aimed at introducing audiences in the rest of India to Kathakali. Shortening the length of the dances, streamlining the costumes, and staging them on an indoor proscenium stage, Ragini Devi and Gopinath gained prominence by transforming Kathakali into evening entertainment for urban theater-goers. From 1933 to 1936 they toured India, presenting their adapted Kathakali "dance dramas" to entranced audiences and rave reviews. In 1938, Devi set sail (without Gopinath) for a European tour, which had barely begun when the escalation of European hostilities forced her to return, with her daughter, to the United States. In New York, she established the India Dance Theatre, a dance school and company on West 57th St. where she profited from the growing American interest in "ethnic" and "exotic" dance. In 1947 she traveled back to India (where her daughter, now married, was living) and in 1948 won a
Rockefeller Foundation grant to support her ethnographic work. For the next several years she traveled the nation, documenting regional classical and folk dance forms. Meanwhile, carrying on the family torch, Indrani became the first-ever "Miss India" in 1952. Soon she was one of India's best-loved cultural ambassadors, performing the dances her mother had fought to preserve before world leaders such as Mao and
John F. Kennedy. Devi, half-jokingly lamenting this state of affairs, proclaimed "My daughter has already pushed me to the background. There was a time when I was known in my own right!" Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, Devi lived in Mumbai (then known as Bombay), compiling the results of her research. She finally saw "Dance Dialects of India" published in 1978. ==Personal life==