Kerala

Hailing from Kerala's Thiyya community, Meenakshi Amma's guru was 15 when he and his brothers opened their own Kalaripayattu school after being denied admission elsewhere because of their low social caste.

Kalaripayattu - kalari means battleground and payattu means fight - is believed to have originated at least 3,000 years back in the southern state of Kerala and is regarded as India's oldest martial art.

Ms Raghavan is fondly known as Meenakshi Amma - Amma means mother in the Malayalam language - in Kerala's Vadakara, where she lives.

"There was no bias when it came to girls enrolling to study Kalari - in fact, physical education was compulsory in all Kerala schools at that time. But we were expected to stop after attaining puberty," she says.

For a few hours on a warm April day, jets paused and silence reclaimed the skies above the international airport in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the southern Indian state of Kerala.