New Delhi: Ebrahim Alkazi, the thespian widely credited as the architect of modern Indian theatre, died of a heart attack Tuesday afternoon at the Escorts hospital in New Delhi. He was 94 years old.
He is survived by his son Feisal Alkazi and daughter Amal Allana, both of whom are noted theatre personalities themselves.
But the doyen leaves behind not just a grieving family, but a legacy glittering with awards — one each of the Padmas, several from the Sangeet Natak Akademi and he was even conferred a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters from France — as well as hundreds of former students from his days as the director of the National School of Drama (NSD).
As its director, Alkazi steered the prestigious Delhi institute for 15 years (1962-1977), during which time he gave shape and voice to the contemporary Indian stage and trained some of the country’s finest actors, including Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Anupam Kher and Pankaj Kapoor.
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A tenacious perfectionist, on and off stage
Born to a Saudi Arabian father and Kuwaiti mother in Pune in October 1925,
Ebrahim Alkazi got involved in theatre while still a student at St Xavier’s College in Mumbai, when he joined Sultan “Bobby” Padamsee’s Theatre Group. Later, he married Padamsee’s sister, costume designer Roshen, and then went on study at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA), but turned down several tempting offers. He returned to Mumbai, where he became a major name in the theatre scene.
In 1962, Alkazi moved to Delhi to take charge of the NSD and its performance wing, The Repertory Company; he would become its longest-serving director.
During his time, he directed plays like Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq, Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, all of which showed his meticulous attention to detail, be it in costumes, diction or lighting, his keen eye for set design and the logical beauty of how he blocked scenes.
In his tenure, he also completely overhauled the syllabus to a more modern one and taught Western and Asian drama and direction, apart from directing most of the school and the Repertory’s productions with a painstaking degree of perfectionism.
For the NSD production of Laila Majnu in the 1970s, for example, a former student tells ThePrint, Alkazi brought a nautanki theatre master all the way from Bharatpur to teach his cast the style of singing and dancing, and he would recommend books, movies, paintings and music to his students so they developed a better-rounded understanding of drama.
Between teaching drama theory and ensuring his students applied the lessons on stage, Alkazi also fought for a bigger and better campus for the school, which, until then, was crammed in next to the Repertory at Rabindra Bhavan. It was during his tenure that the school shifted to its current premises at Bahawalpur House, where an extra hostel wing was installed. He also successfully battled for the NSD to become an autonomous institute.
Strict disciplinarian who could laugh at himself
Many of his former students recall that they could never tell which Alkazi they would get on a particular day — the strict disciplinarian or the man who could laugh at himself.
A student from the 1977 batch, who specialised in direction, recalled how Alkazi would knock on their hostel room doors at 6 am, even in the middle of a bitter winter, demanding to know why they weren’t at the open air theatre practising voice exercises.
“We would all hurriedly scramble out of bed, throw on some warm clothes and run out to practice, our breath forming misty rings in the cold, while he would sit on the furthest seat and say, ‘I want to be able to hear even your softest whisper from here’. He would have left his Nizamuddin house at 5:30am to get to us by 6am, but he always looked so sharp, and was always perfectly turned out. We wondered how he did it.”
Then there was the time that the same student was caught by Alkazi imitating him during a rehearsal for her for her final-year diploma production. She was directing actors Deepak Kejriwal and Anita Kanwar in her own Urdu translation of Harold Pinter’s The Lover. When the cast didn’t laugh but instead looked horrified, she realised Alkazi had been standing at the door and watching, a wide grin on his face.
“After the play had been performed for the exam, he turned to the teachers and external examiners and, to my eternal embarrassment, gave them a full account of my mimicry!” The student, by the way, went on to graduate as the gold medallist of her batch.
She told ThePrint that the last time she met Alkazi was on his 90th birthday, for which his children, Feisal and Amal, had hosted a party. By then he was suffering from memory-related issues. Many of his students were sad that he didn’t seem to recognise them.
Later, when she saw him sitting with his attendant and went to sit by him, he looked at her, took her name and even asked after her daughters.
As always, she thought, he surprised you.
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