Mallika presented a bundle of paradoxes. Dressed in an unusual black costume with a long sleeved blouse, she looked traditional yet modern with her short hair. She performed traditional dances and complemented them with her voluble points of view in English. She was at once a feminist, a speaker of the downtrodden, a storyteller, and a dramatist. In addition, she was openly derisive about the role that men played in society. " ...The prisms through which things were seen were men." The part that man played in subjugating the woman was apparent in Saptadevi. The Bharatanatyam piece followed the lives of Draupadi and Savitri in detail. To quote Draupadi, "...The swayamwaram was mine, the decision was my father's. There was no garland; I was the garland. My life and heart offered to the shooter of a fish! To be decided by a bow and arrow.... To be shared by five- am I a commodity in a market place?" Of her humiliation in the Kaurava court, she says, "Where was the Gita's truth? Was Arjuna not in need of counsel then? ... My five husbands walked away and left me alone. They walked towards paradise, not one stayed by my side.... Heaven must be only for men!"

Mallika's next subject was Sati Savitri; married to Satyavan who is cursed to die within one year. Desperate for her husband's life, she confronts Yama, the god of Death. The confrontation scene was well conceived with a double- sided mask at the end of a stick, one side of it was Satyavan's face, and the other the fierce Yama's. How did people come to expect widows to 'commit sati' in their husband's funeral pyre using her as an example?

Depicting Simhavahini, the shakthi in all her fury, she sketched with her feet the image of a lion on a large piece of cloth kept on the stage over an equally humungous inkpad. This was accomplished during the Kuchipudi item of the same name. A fitting culmination to a presentation that reached out with it's honesty and courage of conviction. The powerful social message not withstanding.