Ebrahim Alkazi

Holding Time Captive

Author: Amal Allana

Staging the cultural history of India between the 1940s and 2000s, and featuring a galaxy of artists and actors as the dramatis personae— including M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, Akbar Padamsee, Gieve Patel, Nissim Ezekiel, Alyque Padamsee, Girish Karnad, Manohar Singh, Vijaya Mehta, Kusum Haidar and Gerson da Cunha.

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Amal Allana’ s compelling biography of her father is the first carefully researched, full-length account of the life, work and times of Ebrahim Alkazi, one of the giants of twentieth-century theatre and a key promoter of the visual arts movement in India. Evoking the excitement of Alkazi’ s student years in England, the controversies that surrounded his provocative ideas to transform the theatre movement in Bombay and later in Delhi, as the director of the National School of Drama (NSD), this book charts Alkazi’ s meteoric rise to the top, with his modernist staging of plays and his aim of putting Hindi theatre on the map. It was at the Sangeet Natak Akademi that Alkazi first confronted resistance to his ideas on the role of tradition in the making of a new ‘ national’ culture. By the 1970s, disillusioned with the curtailing of civil liberties and a dysfunctional bureaucracy, he ultimately resigned from the NSD, developing his own independent institutions for the promotion of the visual arts in India as well as abroad.

Critic Reviews

Amal Allana's narrative is both enthralling and critically astute. While Alkazi emerges as the titanic figure that he was in life―as theatre-maker, painter, cultural impresario, collector, archivist and institution-builder―he also takes his place, in this book, among an ensemble of gifted and original contemporaries...This book is a superb contribution to modern Indian cultural history. -- Ranjit Hoskote