My father had not yet directed a play in Hindi (plays in Hindi had been directed by [P.D.] Shenoy at the Theatre Unit’s SDA [School of Dramatic Arts] in Bombay), so this was going to be a great challenge for him. Given his lack of familiarity with the language* and culture, many of his peers had been apprehensive about his appointment as director of the NSD. Opposition also came in the form of ‘the prevailing drama groups in Delhi opposing the idea of such a school as it would have superseded their own groups,’ mentions Ashfaque Husain. Therefore, Alkazi’s first public production in Hindi in Delhi was a kind of ‘presenting of his credentials’. He was well aware that much depended on a favourable response from Delhi’s audience to these first few productions and that their success would go a long way towards his being accepted as the unquestionable choice to head the country’s first national drama school…

His first move was to enter the tight bastion of the ‘inner circle’. Walking straight into the ‘den’ of the so-called ‘Hindi wallah writers’ camp’, Alkazi caught them unawares by selecting the works of the most experimental and celebrated of the Hindi New Wave, or Nai Kahani, movement. Mohan Rakesh was basically a short-story and fiction writer, while Dharamvir Bharati was a poet, a writer and the editor of Dharmyug, a prestigious Hindi literary magazine. Alkazi had been warned by members of his staff not to touch these two plays (Aashad Ka Ek Din and Andha Yug) as their Hindi was too Sanskritised, they were tedious and they were radio plays, so not stage-worthy at all! Ignoring their apprehensions, Alkazi found that their themes held tremendous contemporary relevance. He was sure he could win over Rakesh and Bharati— two writers of the Hindi literary firmament who held modernist ideas not dissimilar to his own—with his directorial skills.

Aashad, a play with a rural background, was the story of the Indian villager, whose lifestyle, pace and values were succumbing to the inevitable onslaught of urbanisation. Interestingly, Rakesh had set the play in the Gupta period, with Kalidasa, the Sanskrit poet of that era, as its protagonist—a writer from the village who receives accolades from the court, prompting him to migrate to the capital, Ujjain I felt it was a very important work. I took it up because it was a great challenge to me personally; I felt that the basic theme was very interesting and was autobiographical to Mohan Rakesh himself—where he identified himself with a classical playwright like Kalidasa, and where the problems, the issues and the conflicts are similar to his own struggles today. This mix of history and the present, entwined into a single entity, was a modernist strategy that Alkazi too had attempted while contemporising myth in productions of Anouilh’s Antigone and Eurydice. The fact that both he and Rakesh were grappling with similar concepts was reassuring. In hindsight, I feel that both Rakesh and Alkazi had certainly been influenced by [T. S.] Eliot’s path-breaking essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, where Eliot expounds on the modern writer’s attempt to simultaneously encapsulate both ‘timeliness’ as well as ‘timelessness’ in his writing. I believe that this essay profoundly influenced Alkazi’s understanding of the relationship between tradition and modernity in relation to contemporary art as a whole.

However, it was not just Rakesh’s conceptual treatment that attracted Alkazi to Aashad. The plot, in many ways, echoed Alkazi’s own personal journey. We see an idealistic artist drawn away from his village, his roots and his muse, leaving for the capital, where he begins to enjoy the prestige and fame showered on him. Falling in love with another woman who helps him build his career, he fails to return to his first love. Referring to this aspect of the theme, Alkazi said,

   . . . It was a play that did not deal with merely the life of Kalidas, but by analogy, it was concerned with the plight of the creative individual and with his ties to his genius, and his ties to the human beings around him, and how human relationships are sacrificed for art . . . As a creative artiste, ‘Can you use other human beings? . . . can they be used merely as fodder for your creative mill?…

The impact of Alkazi’s first production of Aashad surpassed all expectations. Audiences in Delhi had never experienced this kind of staging before. Abandoning the proscenium theatre and moving towards what was then termed ‘open staging’, where a dynamic, close interaction between audience and actor was possible, the production gained in both intimacy and power, with actors having to eschew loud theatricality. Described as the first open-air production to have ever taken place in the city, Alkazi’s production of Aashad suddenly attracted new audiences—academics from Delhi University, such as Frank Thakurdas, Rati and Richard Bartholomew; playwrights such as Balwant Gargi and Nora Richards from Punjab; and university students…

Alkazi was undoubtedly creating a quiet revolution on a small scale.

Throughout his tenure, Alkazi was keen on the public being privy to the magical transformations he was affecting at the NSD, not only in terms of carving out new spaces for performance but also in inviting them to attend guest lectures that were basically meant for the students. As a result, he cultivated a vivacious atmosphere, enlivened by his own warm, welcoming graciousness. Hindi writers such as Agyeya, inheritors of the Jaishankar Prasad and Premchand legacies, along with young writers such as Dharamvir Bharati, Kamleshwar, Rajendra Yadav and Rakesh, were invited by Alkazi to share their thoughts and ideas through lectures and poetry readings at NSD. For them, it appeared that the young, dynamic Alkazi had suddenly seized this vacant space and filled it with meaningful activity, placing Hindi-language theatre at the centre of his concerns at a national institute like the NSD. Overnight, Hindi writers began to gain prestige and prominence and felt encouraged to write more plays.

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*Alkazi hired a Hindi tutor and would diligently read entire plays with him. He had also hired Gulab Das Broker in Bombay to teach him Gujarati, and, the following year, a Sanskrit teacher. This is an excerpt from Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive by Amal Allana. No part of this excerpt may be quoted or reproduced without prior written consent from its publisher, Penguin Random House India Pvt. Ltd.

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