Veteran Bharatnatyam and Kuchipudi dancer Yamini Krishnamurthy passed away at Delhi’s Apollo Hospital on Saturday, reported PTI. She was 83.

“She was suffering from age-related issues and was in the ICU [intensive care unit] for the last seven months,” the classical dancer’s manager and secretary Ganesh told the news agency.

Krishnamurthy’s body will be taken to her institute, Nritya Kaustubha, in Delhi’s Hauz Khas area at 9am on Sunday. She is survived by two sisters. The details of her last rites have not been shared publicly.

Krishnamurthy received the Padma Shri in 1968, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1977, the Padma Bhushan in 2001 and the Padma Vibhushan – India’s second-highest civilian award – in 2016.

The Hindu reported that Krishnamurthy “is credited with popularising Bharatnatyam in North India, as early as in the 1960s, when she chose Delhi as her home…She strove to take the dance form to the global stage, and like sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar became a sought after name internationally”.

Writing in Deccan Herald, dancer and arts administrator Prathibha Prahlad said that Krishnamurthy, a “first-generation non-hereditary dancer”, had “transformed the classical dance scene in India from the late 50s to the early 90s”.

Born on December 20, 1940, at Madanapalle in Andhra Pradesh, Krishnamurthy grew up in Chidambaram in Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu. Her father was a Sanskrit scholar and grandfather an Urdu poet.

Krishnamurthy began training in Bharatnatyam at the age of five at Chennai’s Kalakshetra School of Dance under Rukmini Devi Arundale.

The Hindu quoted Rama Vaidyanathan, an early student of Krishnamurthy’s, as saying that she brought “power, beauty and glamour” to the dance form.

Krishnamurthy later trained in Kuchipudi under the tutelage of Vedantam Lakshmi Narayana Sastry and Odissi under teachers Pankaj Charan Das and Kelucharan Mohapatra.

Geeta Chandran, a Delhi-based Bharatnatyam dancer, told The Hindu: “She ruled the dance world for a long time and the high standard she set as a soloist is hard to surpass. She was the go-to dancer when it came to prestigious national and global events. Like MS Subbulakshmi and Ustad Bismillah Khan, she became a cultural ambassador.”

Former Rajya Sabha MP and Bharatnatyam dancer Sonal Mansingh said that Krishnamurthy “blazed like a meteor in the sky” and was “the firmament of the Indian dance art”.

Haryana Governor Bandaru Dattatreya, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu and former Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy expressed their condolences at Krishnamurthy’s death.

The Sangeet Natak Akademi also mourned her demise on social media.