There are stories waiting to be told, stories that must be told and stories that tell themselves. Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive-a biography of the theatre titan, penned by his daughter and theatre director Amal Allana-is a bit of all three.
The book begins when Alkazi is around 14 and immediately thrusts the reader into a world where a loud condemnation of Mulk Raj Anand's work about the underdog is countered by an equally passionate argument that cites Bhimrao Ambedkar's writing on the annihilation of caste. The setting is Poona (now Pune) and interested as he is in these discussions, the young Alkazi is more beholden by the fact that there could be an entire magazine devoted to theatre. At home, the lad, supported by his father, is building a library in a small room of the family home, which bears the handwritten sign 'Literrati'.
Born to parents of Arabian descent, there was an 'otherness' to Alkazi that came from his parents striving to stick to their roots and an India that was rapidly being reconstructed under British rule. In a particularly touching piece, Allana mentions her grandfather, Hamed Al-Qadi, pointing to a box of sand carried from his desert homeland, extolling his children to never forgo its honour just as never to betray the land that had made them its own. This dedication to an Indian identity remains strong in Alkazi as an individual (his boyhood joy at being recognised as a Hindustani, and not a Jew or a Parsi) and as an artiste (who is deeply imprinted by Mahatma Gandhi's manner of delivery of his message-effective yet unpretentious). These would go on to fuel his desire for making cultural rootedness the objective of theatrical communication, and then the greater aim of neither trying to be an insider or an outsider, but someone who drew from the most liberal ideas of the day.
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