All the world’s a stage
A homage to the AlkaziPadamsee family, an account of India’s recent theatre and art history, and an account of its author’s theatrical journey
This book is such a sumptuous feast that I had to put it aside every few pages so that I could digest all the abundance. Feisal Alkazi begins his memoir with his enterprising Khoja Muslim grandmother Kulsum and her dedication to giving her children the best education she could. The eldest of them, the trailblazer Sultan Padamsee, could shock with his nudes or with his openly gay poems, when he wasn’t mesmerising audiences with his brilliant productions. His contemporaries such Utpal Dutt with his Unity Theatre in Bengal, Prithviraj Kapoor and IPTA, were all breaking new ground in theatre at that time, but none possessed Sultan’s erudition or his command of the western canon. He dared to begin Othello after the murder, he mentored Ebrahim Alkazi, his sister Roshan and his brother Alyque alike with his Theatre Group, the first modern and avant garde theatre group in India, and possibly the most influential one. Sultan went out all guns blazing when he was just 23. He took his own life when a sailor broke his heart.
Enter Ebrahim Alkazi, Sultan’s favourite protégé, son of an Arab wanderer, a kurtapajama clad precocious student who lived in a shabby room in Mohammed Ali Road, diametrically opposite to the affluent and westernised Padamsees. Both had a shared interest in Art too, and Alkazi was closely associated with the formation of the Progressive Artists Group, comprising Husain, Raza and
Souza, whose first exhibition he inaugurated. Alkazi married Roshan, they left their infant daughter Amal behind and went off to England to study the arts and theatre, which they did with elan, despite intense poverty.
Alkazi’s subsequent return to Bombay, his work first with Theatre Group and then with his breakaway faction Theatre Unit where he trained such stalwarts as Vijay Anand, Satyadev Dubey, Vijaya Mehta, Amrish Puri and Kusum Bahl is an inspiring story of perseverance and conviction. Already, Alkazi’s work had an impact beyond Bombay. It was his production of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone that inspired Karnad to write his first play Yayati. Alkazi’s shift to Delhi to start the National School of Drama and his work there is a story relatively well known, and Feisal does well to tell this part sparingly.
The real strength of the book lies in the stories before and after the Ebrahim Alkazi saga. Feisal’s fun and stage-filled childhood in Bombay, the sudden shift to Delhi, the separation of his parents, his Modern School days with OP Sharma, Sudha Shivpuri and Ved Vyas as teachers, where he made friends with such later luminaries as Tani and Rajiv Bhargava, Pablo Bartholomew and Ram Rehman, Maya Rao, Anamika Haksar Anuradha Kapur, Madhavi and Madhup Mudgal, opens up a new account of Delhi for us. The book is an ode too to the Padamsees, Pearl and Alyque, and to Bombay’s English theatre, but at the heart of it lies Feisal’s tribute to his redoubtable mother Roshan, who remained Alkazi’s mainstay as a costume designer despite her separation from him. Her struggle to bring up her two children and find her own niche as a costume designer, poet, artist and gallerist comes vividly alive for us. But the book is more than a homage to the AlkaziPadamsee family, or an account of India’s theatre, art and architectural history in the post Independence period. It is also an account of Feisal Alkazi’s own theatrical journey where he held the mantle of being Alkazi’s son with a light touch. He formed his own theatre group when still in his teens and went on to direct over 300 productions. Like his father, he too believed that theatre must inspire social change. He has spent an entire life bringing theatre to the marginalised and vice versa, and is the very model of an engaged Artist. Here, one meets Ionesco’s Rhinoceros being performed around the Emergency, Alok Nath performing Pinter’s The Lover, Advani raising his voice against the banning of their play Bhutto, Safdar Hashmi and his assassination, the heady days of Sriram Centre basement theatre and the street theatre movement. Through his work with the underprivileged Feisal repeats a formulation of startling simplicity. He states that “mental health professionals suggest that the wider the range of social roles we play, the better is our mental health”, whether as friends, relatives, caregivers, guardians, mentors or helpers. Feisal has lived this dictum and therefore his life, and its description conveys a sense of fulfilment and purpose. This book fills the reader with nostalgia and pangs of envy for a life well lived.
But I felt a little dissatisfied with the scant mention of two theatre stalwarts Bertolt Brecht and Habib Tanvir who get only one walk on part each. For all the modernism of Alkazi-Padamsee theatre, and undoubtedly it played central role in creating a national Indian theatre, there is one thing that this theatre misses, and one which its predecessor, the much-maligned Parsi theatre had in abundance. This modern theatre is one for the educated, by the educated, done in the educated, learned and polished way. Whether performed in English or Hindi or Marathi, it remains resolutely middle class. The masses find no entry in it. Parsi theatre may not have created anything “of consequence despite reigning supreme for 75 years,” as Karnad complained, but what it had in abundance was a rapturous embrace by the illiterate, the underprivileged, the proletariat. It is difficult to imagine an Alkazi-Padamsee play being lapped up by the unwashed, something which Habib Tanvir’s Naya Theatre routinely accomplished. How does one create a modern theatre in a still largely illiterate country, which can speak to the subaltern? The question remains unasked and unanswered. But that is a small cavil in an account of lives so brilliant that we must stand back and applaud.