Current pose estimation methods make unrealistic assumptions regarding the body postures. Here, we seek to propose a general scheme which does not make assumptions regarding the relative position of body parts. Practitioners of Indian classical dances such as Bharatnatyam often enact several dramatic postures called Karanas. However, several challenges such as long flowing dresses of dancers, occlusions, change of camera viewpoint, poor lighting etc. affect the performance of state of- the-art pose estimation algorithms [1, 2] adversely. Body postures enacted by practitioners performing Yoga also violate the assumptions used in current techniques for estimating pose. In this work, we adopt an image recognition approach to tackle this problem. We propose a dataset consisting of 864 images of 12 Karanas captured under controlled laboratory conditions and 1260 real-world images of 14 Karanas obtained from Youtube videos for Bharatnatyam. We also created a new dataset consisting of 400 real-world images of 8 Yoga postures. We use two deep learning methodologies, namely, convolutional neural network (CNN) and stacked auto encoder (SAE) and demonstrate that both these techniques achieve high recognition rates on the proposed datasets. © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017.