Despite his formidable legacy, there was little material available about Ebrahim Alkazi, beyond reviews of his theatre productions and some interviews.

She had often nudged him to tell the story himself, but he never seemed to find the time. Then he died, in 2020, aged 94. It was up to her now.

It is interesting that Alkazi — a man who shaped modern Indian theatre and devoted his life to freeing it from the grip of “colonial mimicry” — should have succeeded so spectacularly, yet remained so invisible. This was largely by design; he studiously avoided interviews with journalists and scholars.

What is still very visible is the scale of his impact.

As the incredibly influential director of the National School of Drama (NSD) from 1962 to 1977, he influenced a generation of actors and directors, including Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Manohar Singh, BV Karanth and Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry. He designed NSD’s first syllabus, before it opened in 1959.

As a theatre director, he took the walls back down around this art form and returned it to the people. He recast it as a democratic, inclusive and thoroughly modern practice that could tell the stories of a newly independent nation now struggling to discuss and define itself.

Sweeping through Delhi’s cultural landscape, he dragged plays out of stuffy auditoriums and moved them into dramatic outdoor spaces such as the Feroz Shah Kotla fortress and the Purana Quila’s tiered steps.

Here, he staged plays such as Andha Yug (Blind War; 1953; written by Dharamvir Bharati; about the disconcerted survivors of the Kaurava clan) and Tughlaq (originally written in Kannada by Girish Karnad, and a critique of the betrayal of the Nehruvian dream). These were plays designed to spark debate, get people thinking, and draw them back to this ancient form of storytelling and engagement.

Alkazi promoted the visual arts too, as a lifelong friend and supporter of Modernists such as MF Husain and FN Souza. He spent his later years establishing institutions such as the Art Heritage gallery in Delhi, Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York, and Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

All this and more, Allana began to put down, as she planned her book.

Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive was released this year by Vintage. Writing as a daughter, a student (she trained under him at NSD) and a veteran theatre director herself, Allana, 76, paints an intimate portrait of a complex man.

Heard and scene

It was in 2007, after the death of her mother, costume designer Roshen Alkazi (who managed the costume design for almost all Alkazi’s plays), that Allana began looking into her father’s story in earnest.

Working with her husband Nissar Allana, 78, a stage and lighting designer, she began collecting archival material for a series of projects: a 2016 exhibition; a book of essays by and interviews with leading artists and art historians on Alkazi’s contributions to the visual arts; a 2019 exhibition of previously unseen sketches and paintings, curated by Ranjit Hoskote.

It was the serendipitous discovery of those paintings and sketches that inspired her to finally begin work on the biography. “I was shocked to find this treasure trove of 100 works my father had done in the 1940s, stuffed away in this old tin trunk,” she says. “It was in these works that I discovered the genesis of his visual sensibilities. This excited me to go on this journey (of writing the biography), because his plays in many ways are conceived of as paintings in dynamic movement.”

New dimensions emerged, as her research continued. In letters written by Alkazi to his wife, friends and children, and in their replies, she saw into his inner world and his very human insecurities. She began to understand how he had felt during the tumultuous events he lived through: Partition, Emergency, the Gulf War.

Allana quotes liberally from the letters, in her book, and they go a long way towards challenging the unidimensional public image of her father as a strict, uncompromising disciplinarian.

“Because he was a very emotional man, he had a flaming temper sometimes. But he was also very affectionate very loving. And the idea was to show him as a man who was sometimes fumbling, searching and unsure, as we all are, and trying to work things out,” she says.

Into the spotlight

The early chapters of the book follow a teenaged Alkazi, the son of a Saudi Arabian and a Kuwaiti, growing up in cosmopolitan Pune in the late 1930s. Allana traces how his ancestry made him an outsider, but at heart he was soon all-Indian.

It traces how he became enamoured by the possibilities of Jawaharlal Nehru’s ideas for nation-building. And how, in 1942, he attended a speech by Mahatma Gandhi in Bombay that planted in him the idea that theatre could be a way to inspire action.

Eventually, when his parents left India after Partition, he chose to remain. He was 23.

Allana follows him as he heads to London next, to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), learning newly developed techniques. She traces his return to India, drawn by the challenge of creating an “Indian modernity”.

“His idea of Indian modernity was to be open to being inspired by international and world cultures, while seeking inspiration by going back to one’s roots,” she says. “One arrived at a contemporary sensibility by feeding the present with impulses from the past.”

Allana documents Alkazi’s struggle to build NSD into a professional, world-class institution, despite a lack of resources and the resistance from an orthodox bureaucracy. (“I’m always viewed as an outsider! I’m not a Hindi wallah! Nor a Delhi wallah!” she quotes him once saying to Roshen.)

There are poignant, personal anecdotes, brought alive in vividly recreated vignettes and imagined dialogue. She writes with deep sensitivity of Alkazi’s friendship with Sultan Padamsee, Roshen’s brother, who died by suicide at 24. She writes of her parents’ struggles, and of her father’s extramarital relationship with the writer and actress Uma Anand.

“This was something I felt we had to talk about frankly for the sake of credibility,” Allana says. “But my parents, whatever the situation between them, never allowed their work to suffer. Art held them together. The love of art held them together. The belief that art has value held them together.”