‘Ebrahim Alkazi’: The meteoric rise of an artist who shaped contemporary theatre aesthetics in India

Ebrahim Alkazi, a noted art connoisseur, collector and gallery owner, founded the Art Heritage Gallery in Delhi with his wife, Roshen Alkazi. In Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive, the personal is public in the biography of the thespian, as his daughter Amal Allana demonstrates in an endearing ode. Written in a conversational tone, the book traces the simultaneous arcs of Alkazi’s careers and abiding passions – theatre and visual art. It is an illustration of the meteoric rise of an artist who envisioned theatre as a democratic and inclusive endeavour as he charted his own path of marrying aesthetics, technique, approach and social responsibility.

The grain of an artist

In retracing the intimate trajectory of her father, Allana also follows the thread of what goes into the making of an artist. Recreating an artistic milieu that informs, provokes and facilitates a deep immersion into the arts reconstructed through years of research. Alkazi’s buoyant student years in England to days of creative differences in Mumbai that led to the formation of the Theatre Unit, to a pioneer of modernist “democratic work ethic” in independent India as the founding Director of the nation’s premier theatre training institute, are etched out through the robust eye of a theatre director.

The evocative title of the book that, according to Allana, “arises from a few sentences inscribed by my father on a scrap of paper that fell out of one of his notebooks unannounced, on the day he passed away”, sets the tone of the account. Sitting easy on the eyes, the text is lent spatial relief with archival material drawn from the decades – pictures, letters, paintings and sketches. It is interesting to note how in piecing together the full character of the subject, the author juggles between the proximity of a daughter and a disinterested observer.

Born to a family that traced its descent in Arab migrants, Alkazi’s dealings with aspects of identity and belonging, constitute the cadence of the book as the author traces roots of the family. Cities form a backdrop of the narrative and lend their unique flavour as they meld into the personality of a dynamic futurist.

Tracking her father’s childhood in the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic Poona, Allana outlines Alkazi’s early childhood inclusive and liberal influences with warmth, “This symphony of music of various peoples, experienced as a child, embedded itself in the consciousness of Ebrahim Alkazi, providing him with a template, a module, of how sharing occurs – unobtrusively filtering into his understanding of how different cultures interweave and allow life to continue in perfect harmony.” What saves the book from being a plain historical record is the human element and hitherto unknown aspects of Alkazi’s personal history. Here Allana wears the author’s hat and objectively mounts a slice of an artist’s life in all its complexities, warts intact.

Charting his struggle and jubilations in chiselling a new idiom of performance art with ideas perceived as radical at that time, forms the narrative journey of the book. “Artists like me work best in this ‘no man’s land’ of multiple cultures. We are from nowhere and everywhere!” Alkazi is quoted as saying.

A family album

The biography is then a family album, a chronicle of a nation coming into its own and how the destinies of the protagonist and the country overlap. It makes for a compelling read especially because of the conversational tone and tenor and pictures, sketches, paintings and theatrical montages making it a visual delight. The full measure of the complexities of the overlaps of the persona and the person is seen in the author’s sensitive penning of the parallel stories of the coming of age of a young couple in love, dreaming in tandem of the creative life, negotiating the tide of time. A change in the relationship is conveyed to the reader in an epistolary manner through an exchange of letters.

A book of such a wide canvas understandably boasts of extensive research that lends a veracity to the text that’s engaging. The research from primary and secondary sources, a stitching together of memory, creative liberties with dialogue and scenes, and aural inputs make for interesting reading. Allan writes, “We travelled to my father’s workspaces and homes in Kuwait, London, New York, Delhi and Bombay. We were thrilled to find my father’s notebooks from his student days at RADA, notebooks of theatre productions, sketches for sets and lighting plans, sources of music selected for plays, fragile manila envelopes with old reviews and brochures of productions, copies of the Theatre Group and Theatre Unit Bulletin that Alkazi had brought out in Bombay.”

Allana is able to paint, in broad brush strokes, the personality of an artist as a world citizen, whose faith in interdisciplinarity and interculturalism shines through. She writes, “Not wishing to define himself through religion, geographic boundaries or political ideology of any kind, Ebrahim wanted to embrace pure, humanistic values.” Especially memorable are the moments when at the Sangeet Natak Akademi where Alkazi first confronted resistance to his ideas on the role of tradition in the making of a new “national” culture, and stood his ground in support of his ideals. The speech he gave is a remarkable slice of history.

The book brings alive a world of art and creativity with a galaxy of artists and actors as the dramatis personae – including MF Husain, FN Souza, Akbar Padamsee, Gieve Patel, Nissim Ezekiel, Alyque Padamsee, Girish Karnad, Manohar Singh, Vijaya Mehta, Kusum Haidar and Gerson da Cunha – builders of a dynamic new cultural India. A book that took ten years in the making, rebuilding an enduring legacy, should not only interest theatre and art enthusiasts but also appeal to anyone who seeks a shining example of a life well lived.

Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive, Amal Allana, Penguin India.