Holding Time Captive: Amal Allana Brings Compelling Biography On Ebrahim Alkazi

Holding Time Captive shows a dynamic Ebrahim Alkazi in his quest to bring about an inclusive, international, intercultural and interdisciplinary thinking in artistic expressions that is transformative and liberating. This book offers unique glimpses into an enigmatic personality whose emotionally charged life closely reflected and ran parallel to the growth and evolution of his startlingly fresh ideas and vision for a modern cultural movement in India. From Alkazi’s student years in England, to his theatre movement in Bombay and Delhi, this book charts the theatre giant’s meteoric rise and his unwavering commitment to put Hindi theatre on the map.

Amal Allana’s compelling biography of her father is the first carefully researched, full-length account of the life, work and times of Ebrahim Alkazi, one of the giants of twentieth-century theatre and a key promoter of the visual arts movement in India

Here's an excerpt from Amal Allana’s Holding Time Captive

By late evening, Rosh had sorted herself out with a menu and was busy cooking as Souza and Nissim hung around her, trying to help. The radio was on and a hushed silence enveloped the room as all of them listened with reverence to The Waste Land being read out by T.S. Eliot himself.

April is the cruellest month

Breeding lilacs out of the dead land . . .

Elk sat some distance apart at his small desk, in his by now characteristic pose of Rodin’s Thinker. Cutlery tinkled as Rosh set the table. Elk looked up with a scowl, and bringing his finger to his lips, he signalled her to keep silent. She sat down, careful not to allow the chair to scrape against thestone floor. Nissim and Souza felt reprimanded too and guiltily stopped doing whatever they were doing. ‘Bloody hell!’ thought Souza, ‘Elk is behaving as if this is a live performance and that the narrator, in this case the great Eliot himself, is being disturbed!’

38, Lansdowne Crescent was barely recognizable from what it had looked like a few months ago. From a bachelor’s digs with a couple of sticks of furniture, Roshen, in her inimitable fashion, had transformed it into a cosy, comfortable home. Improvising with odds and ends, she used one of her Kashmiri shawls—a cream-and-brown one with tiny paisleysembroidered on it—as a tablecloth. In the centre, she placed a jam jar with a few flowers she had picked up on her way home. The table wa set with an assortment of crockery and cutlery, a few bits that Rosh had brought with her from Bombay and some plates Elk had picked up from a Salvation Army shop. These comprised their elegant dinner service! An African mask stood above the fireplace, one of Alkazi’s prize possessions that he discovered buried under some old newspapers in the local Sunday flea market. Harold Clurman’s The Fervent Years (bought off the pavement outside Foyles bookshop, with Alkazi making at least four hurried lunch hour trips in the needling London drizzle to the place before finally deciding to buy a soaked copy of it for six pence5) now sat atop a pile of neatly arranged copies of Gordon Craig’s journal, The Mask.

Elk’s paint brushes, pencils, etc., were in an old pewter beer mug, while his portfolio of the Hamlet drawings was set to one side of his desk. To the right, above the small twin bed, hung one of Bobby’s paintings—a portrait of Elk. The bedside tables had photographs of Uma at different ages.* The warm glow enveloping the entire room came from a small art deco table lamp, making the space look cosy and lived in.

The Eliot reading was finally over.

‘Chaps, this was amazing!’ said Souza, breaking the spell. ‘I think I’ll give up reading entirely! Why shouldn’t I? When I have the chance to hear T.S. Eliot himself read The Waste Land to me!’

‘This is undoubtedly Eliot’s greatest work,’ said Nissim, shaking his head in disbelief. What they had just experienced was indeed a historic moment. ‘What say you, Elk?’

Elk looked up. ‘Yes, you’re right! Not that one wants to compare, but certainly The Waste Land is in league with Joyce’s Ulysses. I would rank it asthe greatest work of all modernist poetry!’

‘I thought it was so original to divide the poem up into several voices—male and female. It gave the rendering such a dramatic quality; it felt like a performance!’ Rosh offered.

There was a knock.

‘Ah! Here come our guests.’

Baloo, Homi, Krishna Paigankar and three other young artist friends of Souza walked in. The conversation seemed to fly from topic to topic as they settled down to eat. Souza was bent on regaling them with the unprecedented success of the Progressives’ show in Bombay in 1949 an updating them on the imminent arrival of Raza and Husain to London. The fate of Indian modernism was hotly debated, with Souza acknowledging that though there was a great impact of the ‘Medieval and Ancient Art’show in Delhi on all of them, influences and sources in today’s art world came from everywhere.

‘It’s all very well to talk in metaphors about having one’s roots in one’own country. But roots need water from clouds forming over distant seas and from rivers having sources in different lands.’

Roshen had cooked up a storm. Her mother’s recipes of dal—hot and sweet—along with gosht ka salan (lamb curry). They wolfed it down, complimenting Rosh on her culinary skills.

Meal over, a lull descended as they sat back, satiated and drowsy. The meal had been a real treat in these rationed times. Everyone perked up again as Rosh produced a surprise dessert—stewed peaches with condensed milk which she had brought with her all the way from Bombay and saved for an occasion like this! The sight of a tin of condensed milk was met with jubilant applause.

‘Now, Souza, do tell us what all of us have been waiting to hear from you. How is the PAG planning to continue? Can international artists join the group?’ asked Homi Sethna.

Elk quietly picked up his stewed peaches and condensed milk and moved back to his corner. Nissim followed.

‘What are you doing, Elk?’

‘Nothing really. I wanted to show you some of my responses to the ICA show.’ He then laid out his new series of work, ‘Lovers 1’, on his desk.

Nissim was mesmerized. ‘Twenty-five works! My God, Elk, when did you do all this?’

In the background, Souza’s voice was rising to fever pitch: ‘And I tol them to piss off! They just could not understand my intentions . . . It’s a bloody racket . . . ’

Rosh was chatting along with them while washing the dishes. ‘Gosh, Francis, how I wish we had been there to see the show!’

Nissim sat down to examine Elk’s new work more carefully—he could swear he heard African drumbeats in his head . . . and a chill went down his spine! He began to read out the names of the works that Elk had pencilled in, in his neat hand, below the works: ‘The Elopement’, ‘The Cock’, etc.

The others had left. Elk had quietly slipped off to the bedroom and fallen asleep on the bed. Souza and Rosh joined Nissim around Elk’s desk.Souza picked up one artwork after another and carefully put them down.

‘Rosh, Elk has a wonderful potential for creating in line and colour. His drawings are deliberate and powerful, and the linear quality is the best I have seen. I promise you he will make a substantial contribution to contemporary Indian art.’

Rosh looked down, carefully arranging the works back in the portfolio.

Souza continued, ‘He has also sincerity, not only in his work but in you.You Rosh, I think rightly, are the driving FORCE in him. You must support Elk for the furtherance of art. I am not a feminist, but I am conscious of the great influence women have on men.’

Extracted with permission from Amal Allana’s Holding Time Captive; published by Penguin Books