‘Ebrahim Alkazi’: The meteoric rise of an artist who shaped contemporary theatre aesthetics in India

Ebrahim Alkazi, a noted art connoisseur, collector and gallery owner, founded the Art Heritage Gallery in Delhi with his wife, Roshen Alkazi. In Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive, the personal is public in the biography of the thespian, as his daughter Amal Allana demonstrates in an endearing ode. Written in a conversational tone, the book traces the simultaneous arcs of Alkazi’s careers and abiding passions – theatre and visual art. It is an illustration of the meteoric rise of an artist who envisioned theatre as a democratic and inclusive endeavour as he charted his own path of marrying aesthetics, technique, approach and social responsibility.

The grain of an artist

In retracing the intimate trajectory of her father, Allana also follows the thread of what goes into the making of an artist. Recreating an artistic milieu that informs, provokes and facilitates a deep immersion into the arts reconstructed through years of research. Alkazi’s buoyant student years in England to days of creative differences in Mumbai that led to the formation of the Theatre Unit, to a pioneer of modernist “democratic work ethic” in independent India as the founding Director of the nation’s premier theatre training institute, are etched out through the robust eye of a theatre director.

The evocative...

Read more