Exhibition Retrieving the Lost Works of a Master

A recent exhibition brought together a considerable body of Ebrahim Alkazi’s paintings and drawings in several media, which have never been on public view since they were originally shown in the early 1950s and the mid-1960s. So towering is Alkazi’s reputation as a theatre-maker and institution-builder, theatre pedagogue, champion of artists, organiser of exhibitions, and mentor to generations of actors on stage and screen, that the memory of his own artmaking has been largely forgotten.

- Ranjit Hoskote

Individuals who excel in multiple fields run the risk of never being seen in the fullness of their achievements. Each of their chosen fields claims them, but the larger connections that link these varied preoccupations and infuse them with a visionary coherence tend to be lost to sight. As a result, the kaleidoscopic richness of a career becomes reduced to a series of brief bursts of engagement with a discipline, a pattern of swiftly changing emphases. This has been the case with Ebrahim Alkazi (born 1925). Although Alkazi is celebrated as a seminal contributor to postcolonial Indian culture, given his polymathic work as a theatre director, independent curator, archivist, institution-builder, and champion of the modernist turn in Indian art, the narrative of his career is all too often presented in terms of a sequence of shifts — from the visual arts to theatre, from acting to teaching theatre, from the gallery to the archive. A more attentive consideration would demonstrate that Alkazi never abandoned one domain or practice for another; rather, he carried them along on his journey as mutually replenishing resources.