Lit for Life 2025: A daughter’s ode to Ebrahim Alkazi, the architect of modern theatre in India

Amal Allana's biography of Ebrahim Alkazi explores his revolutionary contributions to arts and culture in pre-independence India.

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.

The Hindu Lit for Life 2025 Day 2 LIVE

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.