Ebrahim Alkazi’s biography offers an intimate look at the father of modern Indian theatre

Gandhi’s every word shook Alkazi that day. By the time the meeting was over, he was thinking in idealistic ways. He walked home with a lightness in his step that was unfamiliar to him.

“…The manner in which Gandhiji was able to reach out to each and every person in that huge audience, he not only captured their imagination, but more importantly, encouraged them to take action… Isn’t that what was meant to happen in theatre too? Theatre was the field he (Alkazi) felt more and more drawn to. It was a field where one could make a difference, where one could directly affect the lives of others and bring people together,” writes Amal Allana in a new biography, Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive (Penguin), which marks the centenary of Alkazi, who was born on October 18, 1925.

Aman Allana, theatre director and daughter of Ebrahim Alkazi (Credit: Alkazi Theatre Archives)

After India gained Independence, the work of nation-building started in every sector. Alkazi emerged as the father of modern Indian theatre, the creator of institutions, plays and students. He made productions, such as Ashad ka Ek Din, Andha Yug and Tughlaq, which are still studied for their technical and political significance. The National School of Drama (NSD), in Delhi’s cultural district, Mandi House, stands as a visible landmark of Alkazi’s karmabhoomi.

Alkazi, who had trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London but was imbued in the culture of India, had created a progressive syllabus for NSD and set exacting standards of discipline. The consensus in the theatre world is that his generation of students — among them Vijaya Mehta, Kusum Haidar and Satyadev Dubey, who trained under him in Mumbai, and Surekha Sikri, Manohar Singh, BV Karanth, Mohan Maharishi, Uttara Baokar, Om Shivpuri, Sai Paranjpe, Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Ratan Thiyam and Rohini Hattangadi, from NSD — were a class apart.

“Alkazi saab brought a new imagination to modern Indian theatre. Until then, theatre artistes used to join groups and pick up the art through taleem or apprenticeship. Through his pedagogical intervention at the NSD, Alkazi brought in training, which included Stanislavsky’s system of Method Acting and methodologies culled from traditional Indian theatre practices. As a result, the student-artiste began to see theatre as work and not a hobby. Performers, especially in Hindi theatre, began to work on text and subtext, terms that were a part of world theatre discourse at that time,” says Anuradha Kapur, a senior theatre director and former director, NSD.

Among Alkazi’s plays, Andha Yug, in particular, made artistes and audiences rethink space and site. “It is an anti-war play by Dharamvir Bharti from 1953. Alkazi showed Andha Yug at Ferozeshah Kotla, a historic architectural site of Delhi, rather than a proscenium stage. The form changed so much that everybody forgot that the play was considered a non-performable radio text. It has since been included in the canon of modern Indian theatre,” says Kapur, “Alkazi was brilliant at making and repurposing performance spaces. He transformed a room into a studio theatre at NSD and turned an open-air space with a peepul tree at the centre at Sangeet Natak Akademi to the Meghdoot theatre. Meghdoot is, to this day, one of the best open-air theatres in Delhi.”

Alkazi would stage Andha Yug again in 1974 against the magnificent ruins of Purana Qila. He also presented Tughlaq at Purana Qila, for which he instructed actor Manohar Singh to play the emperor as a genius, far ahead of his time. The performances at public spaces brought in hundreds of people and served to democratise theatre in Delhi.
“My father was always challenging pre-existing norms. He was always an outsider in a way. His new ideas were not embraced with open arms, he had to fight for them to be accepted. He was never interested in being popular. One might say that he was somewhat of a rebel,” says Amal. “As I was growing up, I saw a very tense and agitated father.

He was full of a kind of energy and was always wanting to do more, achieve more. Always insistent on getting to the next level, the next stage.”

Shaping Indian Theatre

Alkazi, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 94, did not wish to be written about, so there is limited research into his life and art. The new biography, Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive, provides a much-needed portrait of an artist’s professional and emotional graph. Amal writes about Alkazi from multiple lenses — of daughter, student, performer and theatre director. She spent 12 years on this book. “I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that I wanted to document Alkazi because there was not enough material available on such an iconic figure,” she says.

Amal is not only Alkazi’s firstborn but also his student from NSD. “What I learned from him at NSD were the basics of how to approach a text, pull it apart and then reassemble it as a live, palpable theatrical experience. Alkazi, as with any good teacher, taught his students to think for themselves and not imitate him. He was not out to create an ‘Alkazi school of Acting or Directing’,” says Amal, who has directed more than 60 plays, such as Nati Binodini, Begum Barve and Himmat Mai. A recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi award, Amal is, at present, director of the Art Heritage Gallery in Delhi, which was founded in 1977 by Alkazi and his wife, Roshen.

For the book, Amal managed to persuade Alkazi to sit before a camera. “Finally, he agreed to an extensive interview with me in New York over two days. It’s a simple video recording with him talking at length about his life and work,” she says. Besides this, she meticulously went through all his personal material, in the form of letters, notes, speeches, articles on theatre and art, sketchbooks, along with newspaper cuttings of reviews. “It was so disturbing to find that institutions such as NSD and Sangeet Natak Akademi don’t have well-documented archives on the performing arts, so locating material was an uphill task,” says Amal.

One of the speeches by Alkazi quoted in the book was made at the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s first National Theatre Seminar in 1956. Alkazi asserts that a new Indian cultural identity could be created by interweaving traditions from across the world. “Our present predicament has nothing to do with what we see as ‘Indian’ and what ‘Western’ though we seem to be obsessed with problems of cultural identity. We should essentially be concerned with what is feudalistic, backward looking, reactionary on the one hand, and that which is rational, egalitarian, reaching out to the future, on the other… Do we not see signs of the sickening ‘Aryan’ myth being raised? In a whipped-up frenzy of this kind, do we not see the danger of a cultural fascism?” he had said.

Amal went in search of the sources of Alkazi’s radical aesthetics. “What was he reading? What plays, exhibitions and talks were he attending? A lot of material came from his letters to my mother where he mentions seeing Laurence Olivier in Hamlet and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire on West End. He began to see contemporary art and theatre as a response to the two world wars. The experience of the wars and the rise and defeat of fascism came home to him even more starkly in a London that had been totally devastated. Buildings were in ruins and food and electricity rationed,” says Amal. She also obtained material from RADA and Dartington Hall in Essex, institutions where Alkazi studied while in England.

The book follows another authoritative work from the family, Enter Stage Right: The Alkazi/ Padamsee Family Memoir (Speaking Tiger), which was launched in 2021 by Feisal Alkazi, a powerful Delhi director and Alkazi’s son. Feisal was born while Alkazi was gouging out his eyes on stage as Oedipus.

The Maharashtrian Arab

Alkazi was born in Pune but spent most of his life in Bombay when it was one of the cosmopolitan nerves of the world, throbbing with British, Arabs, Jews, Iranians, Afghanis, Nepali Gurkhas, Sindhis, Chinese and Eurasians, who had come as traders or merchants. Alkazi’s father, Hamed Ibn Ali Al-Qadi, was an Arab spice merchant who had arrived in Bombay at the age of 16 to make a living.

Arab norms were followed in Al-Qadi’s house, including speaking in chaste Arabic and praying five times a day, but Alkazi also embraced Indian culture. Al-Qadi, who kept a red box of desert sand from Nejd in Saudi Arabia on his dresser, would tell his nine children about their faraway watan and “we are now here, in Hind, as guests, so never betray the hospitality that is being offered to you here”. Alkazi would often say that he was a Maharashtrian Arab.
Something about their upbringing sparked the Alkazi children’s creativity, with Alkazi’s brother and sister, too, becoming artists. “Art is held in high regard in Islam. There has been a proliferation of art, especially architecture and painting across the world, which has its sources in Islamic philosophy and thought. Art is man’s expression of the Almighty’s creation,” says Amal.

Alkazi was introduced to theatre at the age of four by Father Ricklin, his principal at St Vincent’s school in Poona. He was cast in every play at school and acting became his passion.

This passion developed further under the mentorship of the charismatic Sultan Padamsee, who had joined St Xavier’s College in Bombay on his return from Oxford University after the outbreak of World War II.
Sultan, Alkazi and a few founded Theatre Group, and they made Bombay’s first serious English-language plays, such as Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Sultan would also give Alkazi his enduring nickname, “Elk”. Sultan’s death, at the age of 23, forced Alkazi to take over the mantle of leading the Theatre Group.

Ebrahim Alkazi (Credit: Alkazi Theatre Archives)

The Theatre Group also brought Alkazi close to Sultan’s sister Roshen. Sultan often told her, “I am so glad you are marrying Elk and not anyone else. True, he’s a bit of a dark horse, but he has it in him — he has a passion and a quest. If there’s anyone in this group who is going to take theatre seriously, it’s Elk.” Alkazi and Roshen married in 1946 and became an integral part of Bombay’s theatre world.

Amal was born a month after India gained Independence — while Alkazi was rehearsing Hamlet. Alkazi and Roshen, eventually, moved into a two-bedroom flat on the fifth floor of a building, Vithal Court, at Cumballa Hill, Bombay. In quintessential Alkazi style, there were no walls to divide the apartment into separate rooms. Instead, it was full of art. Rehearsals took place in the vast open studio-like space with the entire family engaged in theatre making, from costumes to props to posters. Among the friends who dropped in were the poet Nissim Ezekiel, artists MF Husain and Akbar Padamsee, and Marathi theatre critic DG Nadkarni. Culture at the Alkazi household was not practised for a few hours a day; it was a way of being.

The open lifestyle resulted in Amal and Feisal being privy to everything that happened at home, including the impact that Alkazi’s relationship with actor Uma Anand had on Roshen. In the book, Amal tries to show that it was Roshen’s love not just for Alkazi but for art that held them together. “They felt that art was larger than themselves. I heard my father tell somebody at my mother’s memorial service that it was the power of art that sustained Roshen and him every day of their lives,” says Amal.

Alkazi was only 37 when he was appointed head of NSD. “He was in two minds about going to Delhi to become the director. He felt everything he had achieved in Bombay would be washed away. As a youngster, I did not have any opinions about his going to Delhi. What I do remember is a great sense of insecurity,” says Amal. After Alkazi left for Delhi, their home suddenly fell silent, with no comings or goings.

Alkazi’s years at NSD were eventful, involving great theatre as well as the challenges of setting up world-class theatre infrastructure against heavy odds. Alkazi, especially, wanted to free NSD from the sarkari Sangeet Natak Akademi. “He wanted to make theatre a household entertainment by entering into tie-ups with the national television network like Doordarshan. But he could only do this from a position of leverage, of autonomy,” writes Amal.

It was a tough fight. Alkazi tells Roshen that he is “always viewed as an outsider”. “I’m not a Hindi wallah! Nor a Delhi wallah! I have no lobby! They’re upset that I have made it to the national level by sheer dint of my hard work and merit. Bombay has an altogether different work ethic and culture. In a commercial city like that, one’s success is rated on one’s performance, not on which caste or community you belong to, nor, for that matter, what your blasted mother tongue is.”

Amal had asked her mother if Alkazi was feeling defeated. “He’s resilient, your dad,” her mother had replied. On June 24, 1974, amid the political turmoil of JP Narayan’s Patna rally aimed at destabilising the Indira Gandhi government, the Department of Culture found the time to grant full autonomy to NSD — taking even Alkazi by surprise. The decision would help shape NSD and Indian theatre in the decades that followed.

Bahawalpur House was presented at NSD’s new headquarters. Alkazi was the institution’s longest-serving director, for 15 years. The office is now held by Chittaranjan Tripathy, a well-known director, actor, musician and playwright.
“When I studied at NSD, from 1993 to 1996, Alkazi was like a fairy tale. We used to hear stories of how he used to teach, his strictness and what a brilliant friend, philosopher and guide he was to students. At times, I feel a sense of loss that our generation did not get an opportunity to work with him. At least, he could have been brought to NSD to conduct a masterclass or workshop for us. At that time, he was running a three-year course at LTG and Sushant Singh and Vani Tripathi were all a part of it,” says Tripathy,“Alkazi was without comparison. Sitting in his chair is scary if I think about it.”