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
For an ephemeral form such as live theatre, where the works of most masters, especially theatre directors, disappear in the mist with their passing, it’s heartening that Ebrahim Alkazi’s legacy has been preserved for a posterity he had emphatically staked a claim to more than a half-century ago.
The grand old man of Indian theatre has passed into eternal incandescence, joining the extended roster of eminent luminaries who have left us this year. The extraordinary Ebrahim Alkazi wore many hats – unparalleled theatre doyen, a driven connoisseur of the arts, cultural ambassador – and leaves behind a staggering legacy as one of the most distinctive architects of 20th-century Indian theatre. He was 94, and the high point of his career in the performing arts was arguably his 15-year tenure as the director of the National School of Drama (NSD), from 1962 to 1977. Such was his trailblazing contribution to theatre and its practice, that the Sangeet Natak Akademi accorded him their highest honour, the Akademi Ratna, for lifetime achievement in 1967. No person below the age of 50 is ordinarily considered for this: Alkazi was just 42 when he received it, and remains one of its youngest recipients.
Alkazi grew up in a household of nine children. His family migrated from sun-kissed Unaizah in Saudi Arabia to salubrious Pune, where he was born in 1925, coming of age during World War II. He juggled Arabic tutelage and lessons on the Quran at home with convent education in English and French at the historically significant St Vincent’s High School. “That [blend] had its limitations but it opened up a whole world for me, almost half of mankind,” he told television anchor Syed Mohd Irfan. It was a charmed childhood in which books were never out of reach. From staging one-act plays at school, Alkazi moved to mature productions like Salomé and Othello at St Xavier’s College, with the charismatic Oxford-returned Sultan ‘Bobby’ Padamsee’s Theatre Group. The latter’s untimely demise in 1946 saw Alkazi take over the reins of the group; he later married Padamsee’s sister, Roshen.
(Left): Alkazi as Oedipus in Oedipus Rex | Theater Group’s production, Bombay, 1954
In the 1950s, after a somewhat unsatisfactory stint as an acting student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, he returned to an India on the cusp of a first-wave cultural renaissance. “[RADA was] a rather closed institution, one which had not opened itself out to living theatre movements in other parts of the world,” he said in The Journal of South Asian Literature. That said, his own output as director with Theatre Group, and later Theatre Unit, was primarily productions of European and American plays in English. Working out of a bustling Mumbai terrace, his erstwhile collaborators included Gerson da Cunha, Satyadev Dubey, Usha Amin and Alaknanda Samarth.
One show particularly memorable was Alkazi’s 1959 production of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, based on a blue-blooded woman’s tryst with her intensely impassive valet, in which he starred opposite Samarth. In Shanta Gokhale’s The Scenes We Made, Samarth remembers the play as a series of heightened, distanced, restrained images: “the final exit, an excruciatingly slow, steady walk on high heels through a guillotine-like door on to a ramp horizontal to the lit cyclorama.” Alkazi’s signature tools and approaches were crystallised during this phase. “I acquired administrative skills, learnt to employ ancient Indian arts like Iyengar Yoga and Kathakali in the practice of theatre, communicated a sense of social responsibility to my troupers who learnt to value their group activity as professional, meaningful, relevant, transformative,” he told journalist Sunil Mehra, of this decade-long inning of innovation and consolidation.
(Right): Alkazi in Shanta Gokhale’s The Scenes We Made.
Alkazi was hand-picked by the government to lead the Akademi’s newly formed drama school in Delhi, but after declining several times, he finally took over as NSD’s director in 1962, succeeding Satu Sen, the pioneering lights technician from Bengal. “They gave me a carte blanche to take charge, laying out the red carpet,” he remembered. Under Alkazi, the foundation for the NSD’s multi-pronged pedagogical programme was set in stone. It presented a coalescing of a Western approach to drama with India’s ‘theatre of roots’. And, as a director with a constant supply of dedicated actors, students and alumni (some of whom joined the school’s professional repertory company) alike, he was able to add substantially to his own distinguished oeuvre.
Some of his best-known works were staged in historical monuments and attracted audiences from a wide cross-section of society, from ticket-paying middle-class audiences to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was astounded by this rooted-yet-global brand of Indian theatre. His prized troika of productions include Mohan Rakesh’s Ashadh Ka Ek Din, Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq and Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug, one of his earliest NSD stagings in which he commandeered what was essentially a radio play to create a spectacle in the mould of classical Greek theatre, with the bolstered ruins of Feroze Shah Kotla providing a staging of multiple levels, and unmistakable political echoes. The play placed Alkazi firmly on the national stage, even if the plays didn’t really cross over. When asked by Irfan about why the works did not ‘reach the people’ they were ostensibly intended for, he replied dismissively: “That’s their fault. We toured a lot with it.” Even in its large open-air spaces, the notion of the NSD as an insulated echo chamber set root in the Alkazi era.
Alkazi directing Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug at the ruins of Feroze Shah Kotla.
Among the many illustrious graduates of the NSD who benefited directly from his tutelage, were actors like Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Pankaj Kapur, Rohini Hattangadi and Surekha Sikri; and directors like Sai Paranjpe, Prasanna, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry and Om Shivpuri — all stalwarts of the theatre business spanning generations and sensibilities. In his memoir, And Then One Day, Shah writes, “In Alkazi I had at last found an inspiring teacher, one who liked and appreciated me and didn’t make me feel like a fool, one who was interested in helping me improve my mind, and pushed hard to make me realise the potential he perceived in me.”
In the initial years, Alkazi had his students dig up the backyard of the rented house in New Delhi’s Kailash Colony, that the school operated from, to create a performing stage. Later, he designed two new theatres at the NSD’s present location at the Bahawalpur House, the former residence of the Nawab of Bahawalpur in Delhi. A 200-seater studio theatre, and the open-air Meghdoot Theatre, under a banyan tree, both of which are now housed in a complex christened the E Alkazi Rangpeeth in 2017, to mark 50 years of their inception.
In 1977, Alkazi resigned from the directorship of the school that had become synonymous with his identity. In Anil Dharker’s Icons, da Cunha describes the ‘abdication’ as “a casualty of the bureaucracy and the lobbies he had successfully skirted for many years [also known as] the notorious Delhi Syndrome.” There was an emergent tribe of detractors who enumerated the chinks in his armour, from an unmistakable hubris to an autocratic administrative flair to the creative belligerence and brute stamina that he brought to the rehearsal room, albeit in the kind of controlled environment that his protégés and imitators were loathed to replicate. Shah places his mentor’s processes in the context in an interview, “Any theatre activity is not a democratic process. There has to be a leader, so the charge that Alkazi was autocratic is baseless. Rather than his so-called elitism and arrogance, his students have inherited his discipline, dedication and ability to work himself to the bone. NSD has never quite been the same, his successors unable to shrug off the ghost of Alkazi that hovers around all the time.”
In Mehra’s 1996 article, director Anuradha Kapur says, “Undeniably, he professionalised theatre. One’s differences may be ideological vis-a-vis his characters’ sexual politics, motivations. But then he was a creature of his time.” On his perceived non-combativeness during the Emergency, Alkazi said, “Cheap sloganeering is not the work of academic institutions,” calling attention instead to the political subtext of the plays he staged around then. In 1975, he had said, “I think there is a very close connection between politics and theatre, between social conditions and theatre. I think theatre needs to play an even more active part in shaping the way people live, in creating a progressive form of government which is meaningful to large numbers of people.”
Of course, the closing of a chapter marked the beginning of another innings that took up much of the maestro’s later decades. With Roshen, he founded the Art Heritage Gallery in Delhi the same year he bid adieu to theatre (although there would be an ill-fated comeback). The full extent of his journey was the subject of a travelling exhibition and book, The Theatre of E. Alkazi – A Modernist Approach To Indian Theatre, put together by his daughter, theatre director Amal Allana, and her husband, the stage designer Nissar Allana. As this writer had written about the showcase, “Panels emblazoned The Alkazi Times present the signposts of Alkazi’s life as news clippings, interspersed with actual microfiche footage — ascensions of kings and prime ministers, declarations of war and independence, and even snapshots from theatre history. It is certainly monumental in scale, full of information about Alkazi’s genealogy, childhood, education and illustrious career. While there is the slightest whiff of propaganda, it is whittled down by Allana’s skills as a self-effacing raconteur during the talks. Her accounts are peppered with heart-warming personal anecdotes that give us a measure of the real person behind the bronzed persona.”
For such an ephemeral form as live theatre, the works of most masters, especially theatre directors, disappear in the mist with their passing. It’s heartening that Alkazi’s legacy has been preserved for a posterity he had emphatically staked a claim to more than a half-century ago.
— All images via Facebook
source: http//www.firstpost.com / Firstpost / Home> Art & Culture> News / by Vikram Phukan / August 05th, 2020
