4 min readHyderabadApr 26, 2026 01:50 PM IST
For Prabhu Deva, it started with a VCR hired for an evening and a cassette of Thriller. He was in the middle of his Bharatanatyam training when he first encountered Michael Jackson, and the collision of those two worlds, classical Indian dance and the most electric performer the West had ever produced, set the course of his entire career.
“Those days, cassette deck wasn’t easily available,” he recalled, adding, “We used to hire VCR to watch films. One day, I watched ‘The Thriller’. It changed me forever.”
The impact was immediate and total, recalled Prabhu Deva in an old interview with O2 India. “I wondered, ‘Who is this guy with such a unique style!’ I had never seen anyone dancing like that. The whole world was mesmerized. I wasn’t an exception.”
The morning after, the consequences arrived in the dance studio. “While practicing Bharatanatyam, I started performing steps of Michael Jackson. My Guru scolded me, ‘Have you gone mad?’” When Prabhu Deva explained what he had seen, the guru was unmoved and asked him to focus on Bharatanatyam.
But the instruction could not undo what the Thriller video had done. “Though my body continued practicing Bharatanatyam, my mind was immersed in Michael Jackson’s moves,” he said. Without access to a cassette recorder or the song itself, he worked purely from memory. “Whatever I saw, I started practicing, without music,” he said, training alone in front of a mirror, reconstructing a dance he had seen exactly once.
When Prabhu Deva met his idol
In 1996, the gap between admirer and idol closed. Michael Jackson brought his History World Tour to Mumbai on November 1, 1996, and Prabhu Deva found himself in the room where it happened. Producer Bharat Shah was the one who made the meeting possible, putting together the production and sponsorship for the India leg of the tour. “Bharat Shah took me there,” Prabhu Deva said, adding, “Only 3-4 persons were allowed. When he asked me to come, I was elated, he didn’t take his son along.”
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The company in that room carried its own weight. “Asha Bhosle, I and Bharat Shah, we met Michael Jackson. We shook hands. He hugged me.” A photograph was taken, but it never arrived. “It was clicked by MJ’s photographer. No one was allowed to click pictures. They assured, ‘We are taking pictures. And we’ll send them to you.’ But those photographs never reached us.”
The absence of the photograph did nothing to diminish the memory. “I was mesmerized. It was like a dream come true,” he said. “Michael Jackson was an ultimate inspiration for dancers. I’m a great fan of MJ. It’s not merely about his dance movements. There was power, magic that can’t be explained. It’s not just his dance and singing. There is something beyond. There is only one Chaplin, one Bruce Lee and one Michael Jackson.”
Three years after Mumbai, Prabhu Deva stood on the same stage as the man himself. In 1999, Prabhu Deva, his brother Raju Sundaram, Shobhana, and AR Rahman performed at the MJ and Friends concerts in Munich, Germany, two charity stadium shows organised to raise funds for children in Kosovo, Africa. “Me, my brother Raju were to perform Bharatanatyam, with Shobhana. Three of us were scheduled to perform Bharatanatyam,” he said. Their slot was the evening’s final performance, scheduled immediately after Michael Jackson’s set, with the singer himself set to join them on stage.
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However, it did not happen that way. During his performance, Jackson was injured on a stage mechanism, a crane-like structure called the Bridge of No Return that was used during his song Earth Song. The central section of the bridge collapsed during the performance, hurting Jackson’s feet and back. He finished his set but was taken to hospital immediately afterwards. “While performing, Michael Jackson got injured. As soon as he completed his performance, he was escorted away,” Prabhu Deva recalled.
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