At The Hindu Lit for Life 2025, Amal Allana speaks about her father Ebrahim Alkazi, who led the modern theatre movement in India with an extraordinary vision.
Amal Allana in conversation with Ritu Menon at The Hindu Lit for Life 2025. | Photo Credit: R. Ragu
Theatre director Amal Allana, who recently released a riveting biography of her father Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive gave a racy account of Alkazi’s revolutionary contributions to arts and culture in the creative landscape that was emerging in pre-independence India into the later decades.
She said the title of her book was apt as she found the words scribbled by her father in his notes that read ‘I wish I could live longer to hold time captive.’
A six-minute documentary on Alkazi charting the journey of his quest for a liberal approach to the arts in the Indian sub-Continent preceded Amal Allana’s conversation with Ritu Menon at The Hindu Lit for Life session on the second day.
Setting the narrative in Bombay of the 1940s when Alkazi came as the son of a migrant trader from Saudi Arabia, Amal spoke about how his innovative ideas from the young age of 22 coupled with daring new experimental projects transformed the theatre movements pan-India and later led to the establishment of the National School of Drama in Delhi in the 1960s. It was the time when creative history was under-researched and Alkazi strode the stage with arrogance, resoluteness, and brilliance.
As the daughter, Amal brought a personal perspective to the intangible landscape of Alkazi’s passions as she step-by-step unfolded the layers of his cultural, artistic and nationalistic identity. “His pedagogical skills took form as a response to the social and political life. He introduced language in theatre and nationalised it,” she said.
With Sultan Padamsee (elder brother of filmmaker Alyque Padmasee) and other independent-minded creative individuals, he broke boundaries and embraced the radical and precarious theatre life. They were all progressives and reinforcing each other. Amal narrated how Alkazi went overseas to study modern theatre and took Nissim Ezekiel along. He had the disposition of taking people along with and their idea of total theatre included all forms of arts feeding into one another.
“So with music, lights, costumes, literature, discussions and brochures he created dramatic experiences translating, producing and directing plays from the Western pantheon,” Amal said and added Alkazi was particularly influenced by Tagore’s concept of Santiniketan integrating liberalism with fine arts.
Not only was Alkazi interested in training a body of thinking actors but he also trained audiences to appreciate modernity in theatre, she said.
The Hindu Lit for Life event is presented by KIA India and is in association with Christ University. Associate Partners: LIC, RR Donnelley, Blue Star, Brigade Group, NITTE Deemed-to-be University, PROchure, Singer, Chennai Port Authority & Kamarajar Port Ltd, Uttarakhand Tourism, Vajiram and Ravi, Indian Bank, Akshayakalpa and ICFAI Group. Realty Partner: Casagrand. Bookstore Partner: Crossword. Food Partner: Wow Momo, Beverage Partner: Beachville, Radio Partner: Big FM, TV Partner: Puthiya Thalaimurai Gift Partner: Anand Prakash. Supported by: US Consulate, Chennai, Water Partner: Repute
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Lit for Life / by Soma Basu / January 19th, 2025
Cover page of Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive
Ebrahim Alkazi’s father Hamed Alkazi was an immigrant businessman in India. He came from Nejd in Saudi Arabia as a young man to Calcutta and then to Bombay. Through hard work and honesty, he established himself in the export business. He raised his family in India. The children stayed back in India when he left the country in 1948 after Gandhi’s assassination, first for Karachi, then London, and to Beirut. Hamed while providing for their Western education in Poona saw to it that they were taught Arabic and also the Quran. Ebrahim and his siblings retained their parents’ values of etiquette and social conservatism.
Ebrahim grabbed the opportunities his education provided him of plunging into literature, music, art of times that India was exposed to during the colonial period. The politics of the period had a different impact on Hamed and Ebrahim. The father was apprehensive of the political volatility, but the son was electrified.
Amal Allana, the daughter, theatre personality in her own right and biographer, captures the magical moment of Ebrahim’s indirect baptism. He is pulled into the Congress session of August 8, 1942, when the Quit India movement was announced. Ebrahim was on his way to Sophia College for a debate at 9 am and reach St Xavier’s for an audition for the college drama at 2 pm. The streets were crowded and people were rushing in one direction. He goes to the meeting and he is mesmerised by Gandhi’s simple words. Amal recounts the episode intertwining it with that of his elder brother Ali going off to join the army even before Ebrahim came to Bombay.
If business was what engaged Hamed Alkazi, it was the arts, especially theatre, that absorbed the full attention of Ebrahim. His burning passion was to do something in the theatre and Bombay provided the door to enter upon his lifelong vocation. He had ready entry to a group of young men led by Sultan Padamsee, known to the social group as Bobby, who belonged to a well-off Khoja family, and the upper social circle of Bombay. Ebrahim became a natural member of the group. It was here that he met Roshen Padamsee, whom he will marry when he barely 21. But before that Bobby commits suicide. Amal handles his sexuality issue in the most natural manner, which any other biographer would have made into a major talking point of the 1940s Bombay.
Ebrahim, like many young men and women of the time in urban India, was consumed by the passion for radical modernism that was unfolding all over Europe in the arts and in literature. It was this mission that drove Ebrahim to go to England, and he sought his father for financial help, to pursue first painting and then theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. Despite his hunger for all that is modern, Ebrahim was not a bohemian. He remained an Arab at heart, simple, reserved and taciturn. He had studied deeply the issues of theatre but he was not loquacious. He could explain his point of view emphatically, and this is what carries the day for him when he attends the theatre seminar in Delhi to which he is invited in the early 1950s, and which leads to the government appointing him the director of the National School of Drama in Delhi in the early 1960s.
At one level, Ebrahim’s and Roshen’s life is a swirl of celebrities in the art circle of Bombay, and later in Delhi. But the relations between Ebrahim and Roshen were strained. At one point, Ebrahim was drawn to Uma, the first wife of Chetan Anand, and after her divorce from Chetan, she was keen to be with Ebrahim. But Ebrahim decides to hold back. The Arab sense of duty remains ingrained in him. When he is facing an internal crisis, he returns to his family, to the Arab lands, to recover his sense of balance. Here is the strange case for today’s India, which is turning ominously xenophobic. Ebrahim, the Arab at heart, was passionately devoted to create a vibrant contemporary, modern theatre in independent India, and he showed how to do it when he turned from the production of plays in English in Bombay to producing Mohan Rakesh’s Aashaadh ka Ek Din and Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug in Hindi. He was an Indian with an Arab’s inner reserves. It is something that will beat the understanding of many in today’s India.
Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive
Amal Allana / Penguin Vintage / pp. 647; Rs 1,299
source: http://www.deccanchronicle.com / Deccan Chronicle / Home> Lifestyle> Books and Art / by Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr / May 25th, 2024
Ebrahim Alkazi will continue to live in the hearts of Saudis and Indians who are on the quest to deepen the friendship and cultural heritage they share.
Ebrahim Alkazi (1925-2020)
Last week, we lost Ebrahim Alkazi, a legend of Indian theatre with Saudi Arabian roots. I fondly remember my first experience of meeting him in the spring of 2014 at his house in New Delhi. I was touched by his unique character and his passion for the arts. He greeted me with a few words spoken in the distinct Qassimi dialect. Alkazi was also a noted art connoisseur and collector, credited for fundamentally transforming Indian theatre and having etched a name for Indian theatre worldwide. His legacy will forever remain a testament to the rich intellectual and cultural links between Saudi Arabia and India.
Alkazi’s father, Hamad, was a trader from Unaiza in Saudi Arabia’s Qassim region, who subsequently settled in Pune where Ebrahim was born in 1925. Despite his early immersion in theatre, he gradually pursued his love for visual arts. He showcased the avant-garde artist in him throughout India, the US and Europe through his path-breaking work before becoming the director of the National School of Drama in Delhi and the Asian Theatre Institute in 1962. He will always be remembered for his contributions in the field of arts that resonate with our cultural bonds. The strings that bind Saudi Arabia and India are many and have become stronger and more diverse over time. However, the cultural ties that the two countries share are perhaps the deepest. Pre-Islamic Arab poetry has many references to Indian swords and several other Indian goods.
The two countries have a fascinating history of intellectual exchanges. Science, arts, literature, and languages – the mutual influence has indeed been profound. For instance, many Indian texts in the field of medicine, mathematics and astronomy were translated over the centuries into Arabic. The father of Indology is none other than the Arab scholar Al-Biruni. His monumental work Ta’rikh al-Hind is undoubtedly the most comprehensive pre-modern encyclopaedic work on India.
Another notable text, the Panchatantra, was translated by the Arabs who took it to Europe and the rest of the world, as were Hitopadesha and Chanakya’s Arthashastra. India’s famous medical treatises such as Charaka and Susruta were translated into Arabic as well.
The Arab travellers were also prolific writers and wrote extensively on India, its people and diverse cultures. Writers such as Sulaiman, Ibn-ul-Faquih, Al-Masudi and Al-Idrisi documented in great detail their impressions of south India, its people, customs and traditions. The world-famous Arabian Nights also called Alf Laila in Arabic and Adventures of Sindbad the Sailor too describe southern India. According to Ibn Nadeem, a 16th-century Arab writer, Sindbad was written in India.
These deeply-rooted cultural ties have continued to grow. For instance, Yoga has become an increasingly popular sport in Saudi Arabia. Since November 2017, the International Yoga Day is celebrated in an open area in the centre of Riyadh. In 2018, India was a guest of honour at our annual cultural festival of Al Janadriyah. The theme of the Indian pavilion at the festival was “Saudi ka Dost Bharat” (India is a friend of Saudi Arabia). This last decade has been seminal in expanding our friendship into a strategic partnership.
A most significant milestone in our ties with India was the visit of His Royal Highness Crown Prince to India in February 2019, which re-affirmed the deep commitment of the two nations to strengthen their strategic engagement.
Our shared cultural bonds are also deepened by the religious ties between our peoples. The annual pilgrimage to Makkah has facilitated the exchange of cultures and traditions as well. But above all, our ties have been strengthened by pioneers like Ebrahim Alkazi. He will continue to live in the hearts of Saudis and Indians who are on the quest to deepen the friendship and cultural heritage they share.
This article first appeared in the print edition on August 12 under the title “A symbol of friendship”. The writer is the ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to India
source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Opinion> Columns / by Saud Bin Mohammed Al Sati, Ambassador Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to India / August 12th, 2020
The Padamsee extended family with Ebrahim Alkazi and Alyque Padamsee standing second and fourth from left, respectively | Photo Credit: From ‘Enter Stage Right – The Alkazi/Padamsee Family Memoir’ . courtesy the Alkazi Theatre Archives
The Alkazi and Padamsee clans have played, and continue to play, an extraordinary role in the history of modern Indian theatre
“Oh god, it’s a page turner!” That was the cry from various family members on reading the first draft of Feisal Alkazi’s family memoirs published earlier this year. Titled Enter Stage Right — The Alkazi/Padamsee Family Memoir (Speaking Tiger, 2021), it is an irresistible, exciting read. The narrative details are gripping, the pace exciting, and viewing the times described in the book of the two families in pre- and post-Independence India through the lens of Feisal allows us to enter a world that we can relate to from stories that our parents and grandparents told us of the times they lived through.
Legendary names
Both names are legendary; the Alkazi and Padamsee clans contributed hugely to the formation and recognition of modernism in both Indian theatre and art. It all started when Bobby, or Sultan, Padamsee, the eldest Padamsee brother — the two families had 17 siblings between them, several of whom would distinguish themselves in theatre and the arts — had to return to Bombay after just six months as a student at Oxford due to the outbreak of World War II. What followed was a period of creative efflorescence as
E. Alkazi weds Roshen, October 1946 | Photo Credit: Photo Credit: From ‘Enter Stage Right – The Alkazi/Padamsee Family Memoir’ . courtesy the Alkazi Theatre Archives
Bobby penned more than 100 poems, drew, painted watercolours and, one day in 1943, gathered a group of keen college students around his mother, the Padamsee matriarch Kulsumbai’s, horseshoe-shaped dinner table weighed down with mouth-watering Khoja cuisine. Bobby announced a plan to launch their own theatre group, the aptly named Theatre Group, as an alternative to commercial theatre, inspired by the group theatre movement of 1930s’ New York. One of those in attendance at that dinner was the young Ebrahim Alkazi.
Human angle
The group would flourish over the next few years, and court controversy with productions like an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, in which Bobby’s 19-year-old sister, Roshen, performed the risqué dance of the seven veils. Bobby would die by suicide aged just 24 in 1946, but the group went on, reaching its zenith in the coming decades, and three of his disciples married his sisters to found a cosmopolitan clan — including Ebrahim, who married Roshen. These were heady times of enormous intermingling, set in the dying days of the Raj and the dawn of Nehruvian India. The search for a new way of living creatively through a rich cultural life that was looking for a unique national identity drew in a very intense and close-knit community and family theatre with a galaxy of close friendships between authors, poets, painters, musicians and actors. As Feisal comments in the memoir, “Going to London together in 1947, there was a Roman Catholic like [F.N.] Souza, a Muslim like my dad, a Jew like Nissim Ezekiel, great friends like Krishna Paigankar and Akbar Padamsee, the idea that they were from different communities was not in anybody’s mind at all… we were always in and out of each other’s houses as well, in my family it was all the artists as well as the theatre people. We grew up with that — it gives a human angle to all these great giants that art historians write about.”
The cover of ‘Enter Stage Right — The Alkazi/Padamsee Family Memoir’
After training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in 1947, Ebrahim returned home and rejoined Theatre Group. However, following a rift with others in the group, he left and founded his own Theatre Unit company at the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute in the 1950s. The Institute played an important role in nurturing modern Indian art and drama, and Ebrahim
found a space for uninhibited creativity there, before he moved to Delhi in 1962 to head the National School of Drama for 15 years. Over the years, his contribution to widening the scope, subject matter and audience for Indian theatre would be extraordinary, as would those of his brother-in-law Alyque Padamsee, Mahesh Elkunchwar, and Safdar Hashmi. Alyque, known for directing productions ranging from the English version of Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq to Jesus Christ Superstar, has also been called the father of Indian advertising, and played Jinnah in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. His first wife was Pearl Padamsee, a stage and film actor, director — her oeuvre included Godspell, the first big musical produced in Mumbai — and producer. Their daughter, Raell Padamsee, runs her own production house, ACE, in Mumbai.
Home to stage
The rich family legacy also continues through Ebrahim’s son Feisal, who started devising plays with friends in Barry John’s Music Theatre Workshop in the early 80s. Although theatre is his first love, Feisal wears many hats — theatre and television director, author, educationist, counsellor, filmmaker and founder of Ruchika Theatre. His works include Noor, a sympathetic, gendered lens on Noor Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal; A Quiet Desire, the story of Rabindranath Tagore and of his brother and sister-in-law Kadambari; the adaptation of Kipling’s The Jungle Book into a coming-of-age story, retitled Yeh Bhi Jungle, Woh Bhi Jungle, in which the character Mowgli epitomises every important transition of adolescence in his search for identity.
E. Alkazi as Macbeth in a production directed by him | Photo Credit: From ‘Enter Stage Right – The Alkazi/Padamsee Family Memoir’ . courtesy the Alkazi Theatre Archives
Along with his sister, Amal Allana, and her husband, Nissar Allana, Feisal has strongly believed in the mixing of generations in creative work. “I make it a point that the infusion of the next generation in all the years of Ruchika is so crucial. All our kids are there and the people who started it… to keep the generations going and learning from each other.” Radhika, Feisal’s wife, an accomplished actress and arts educator, says, “It was so new to me, this world — in the family, in the home, in the drawing room — your furniture would be on stage, your clothes would be on the stage.” When Zohra Sehgal worked with Feisal in the Ruskin Bond serial Rusty, she found herself wearing a costume that was from Radhika’s trousseau. Feisal recalls her saying, “Hamare gharon mein aise hi chalta hai” (This is how it is in our homes).
The story of these two families, who played such a vital role in the history of theatre and art, is an imperative chapter in the country’s socio-cultural history.
The writer is a Delhi-based artist, arts educator, curator and researcher.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Society> Spotlight / by Kristine Michael / July 10th, 2021
It is a classic case of believe it or not. Ebrahim Alkazi, the celebrated Indian theater director, has his roots in Unaiza in Qassim.
Alkazi’s businessman father, Hamad, came from Saudi Arabia and did business in India in the 1960s and 1970s. That was before the oil boom changed the face of Saudi Arabia.
Alkazi, now 90, went to St. Vincent’s High School in Pune and St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. He went to London for training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
On Feb. 20, when Alkazi will be honored at the 2nd Saudi Film Festival in Dammam, it will be like a homecoming for the prodigal son.
“We want to honor pioneers in the field of theater,” said Ahmed Al-Mulla, director general of the festival. “And Alkazi is top on that list.”
Alkazi has played the role of a bridge between Indian and Arab cultures. “We consider him as a treasure and a maker of history. We want to present him as a role model to our Saudi youth,” said Al-Mulla.
He said a documentary on Alkazi will be screened during the opening ceremony, and a book is also being published illustrating his remarkable life and achievements.
Early on in his career, Alkazi got associated with the Bombay Progressive Artists Group, which included M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza, Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta, artists who were later to paint from his plays and design his sets.
As the director of the prestigious National School of Drama, Alkazi revolutionized Indian theater by the magnificence of his vision, and the meticulousness of his technical discipline. He trained many well-known film and theater actors and directors, including Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah and Rohini Hattangadi. He also founded Art Heritage Gallery in Delhi.
Alkazi’s father spent his life trading between Pakistan, India, Turkey, Kuwait and Lebanon. He settled for some time in India, when his son Ebrahim was born in 1925 in Pune.
His daughter Amaal and son Faisal are also associated with theater.
Alkazi speaks highly about his father and takes immense pride in his Saudi roots and considers his early days in Pune as “the richest moments in my life.”
source: http://www.arabnews.com / Arab News / Home / Jeddah – February 18th, 2015
