His First Intaglios

To most people, Alkazi바카라�who turned 94 on October 18바카라�is a foundational figure of postcolonial Indian theatre, a mentor to several generations of actors on stage and screen. The art world knows him as a champion of Indian modernism. A serial institution-builder, he founded, co-founded or transfigured the Theatre Group, the Theatre Unit, the National School of Drama, Art Heritage, Sepia International, and the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts. These achievements have, however, eclipsed the fact that Alkazi was a visual artist in his own right. Visitor after visitor to Opening Lines, the exhibition of his works from 1948 to 1971, which I have curated at Art Heritage and the Shridharani Gallery, New Delhi, has much the same look of amazement and the same response: 바카라�I had no idea he was a painter.바카라�

Talking to me about Alkazi바카라�s art on that afternoon in the late 바카라�80s, Ezekiel evoked the years that he and Alkazi had spent in post-World War II London, a metropolis partially in ruin, yet seized by a resurgent energy after six years of conflict. Together with Alkazi바카라�s wife Roshen, the painter F.N. Souza, and Souza바카라�s wife Maria, they would attend concerts and lectures, visit museums and galleries, go into the countryside. All around them, painters, theatre-makers, dancers, musicians, and film-makers were gearing up for a renaissance. Alkazi바카라�s 바카라�basement flat바카라� in Lans­downe Crescent, Notting Hill바카라�residence, studio, meeting place for the group바카라�makes its appearance in several of Ezekiel바카라�s poems.

And yet, for over three decades, Alkazi바카라�s paintings were a Holy Grail, never seen by mortal eye. Until about two years ago, when I received an excited call from theatre director Amal Allana, Alkazi바카라�s daughter. Swearing me to secrecy, she told me what she had discovered during a spring-cleaning mission at the family farmhouse. From an old trunk, there surfaced a battered folder bearing the label of the SS Stratheden, the P&O Line ship on which Alkazi had made his voyage out to England in 1948 and back in 1951. Inside, largely pristine and untouched by the dread hand of time, were the works he had exhibited at the Left-leaning Asian Institute in London in 1950 and in Mumbai바카라�s newly opened Jehangir Art Gallery in 1952. Amal invited me to curate an exhibition around this marvellous discovery. As we went along, she also re-discovered the ink and charcoal drawings that her father had exhibited at the Shridharani Gallery in 1965. It has been a very special privilege for me to revisit these works and their ambient histories, and to present them to a contemporary audience.

What strikes us most forcefully is how formally accomplished these works are, how robustly they stand up to the passage of time and shifts in taste. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, while still in his twenties, Alkazi drew critically and productively on the then-dominant global artistic preoccupations with Primitivism, myth, and ant­hr­­o­pology. Stone Age drawings, West African masks, Mesoamerican sculpture바카라�all these infuse his early work with their energies. While we now regard Primitivism as the articulation of an acq­uisitive, colonial mentality, it did hold out the promise of transcending the conventional limits of Western art-making during the mid-20th century. How, we may speculate, did a young and alr­eady polymathic intelligence like Alkazi바카라�s, dra­wing on his Arab and his Indian inheritance, embrace and adapt it?

Alkazi has sometimes referred to himself as a 바카라�Maharashtrian Arab바카라�. The self-description is acc­urate: he was born in Pune in 1925. His father, Hamed ibn Ali al-Qadi바카라�the family name was rapidly Anglicised to 바카라�Alkazi바카라�바카라�had come to India as a spice merchant in 1915 from the al-Qassim region in the heart of Nejd in the Arabian Peninsula (Nejd has, since 1932, been part of Saudi Arabia). Alkazi바카라�s mother, Miriam, belonged to a Kuwaiti family with strong links to western India; she spoke Arabic, English, Marathi, Guja­rati, as well as Urdu. The family바카라�s mental world was multilingual and transcultural. A resident tutor, a young Arab, instructed Alkazi and his siblings in Arabic and magazines were ordered from Egypt. They were also in close social contact with their Parsi, Anglo-Indian and Maharashtrian neighbours on Syn­ag­o­gue Street. V.N. Dixit, who founded the Int­­­­­ernational Book Service, Poona, in 1931, would welcome Alkazi, even as a 13-year-old boy, to his bookstore; Alkazi바카라�s lifelong habit of collecting books began early. Artistically attuned, three of the siblings would go on to be artists: Alkazi himself, his older brother Basil and his younger sister Munira.

Alkazi바카라�s work in the late 1940s and early 1950s is informed by his fascination with Shakespeare바카라�s indecisive anti-hero, Hamlet; with Joyce바카라�s picaresque reinterpretation of Homeric myth in Ulys­ses; and with the Christ theme, which had taken possession of his imagination as he transited through two Jesuit institutions, St. Vincent바카라�s School in Pune and St. Xavier바카라�s College in Mumbai. A key role in Alkazi바카라�s trajectory must be assigned to his first mentor, the charismatic Sultan 바카라�Bobby바카라� Padamsee. Bobby, who had returned home to Bombay from Oxford in the early 바카라�40s, was the scion of an Ismaili Khoja business family.

Like many of Bombay바카라�s mercantile elite families during this period, the Padamsees were in transit between a more conservative culture embedded in a Gujarati-speaking ethos and a more cosmopolitan culture sustained by exposure to the Anglo­phone ascendancy. Bobby was a classic product of this transition: Oxonian and urbane, yet deeply interested in the aesthetic philosophies of the East, he wrote poetry, painted, and directed plays. He was responsive to a spectrum of cultural idioms ranging from Central European expressionism to southern India바카라�s classical dance-theatre forms. He established himself as an impresario, directing cultural activity at St. Xavier바카라�s College, which Alkazi had joined in 1942.

Coming under Bobby바카라�s sway, Alkazi opened himself to a thorough-going internationalism, while also being carried along on the momentum of an India on the verge of gaining independence. In this, he clearly also followed his own instincts as a transcultural subject: he came from an Arab family that had settled in western India. Bobby바카라�s early death in 1946 devastated his family and friends, and inspired them to continue his legacy through what bec­ame, for many of them, a lifelong commitment to the arts. Alkazi had already fallen in love with Bobby바카라�s sister, Roshen; they were married later in 1946. Their marriage was also a dynamic collaboration, as Roshen des­igned the costumes for Alkazi바카라�s productions, and went on to imm­erse herself in research, writing the benchmark book, Ancient Indian Costume (1983).

Alkazi was only 36 when Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, one of Nehruvian India바카라�s most magisterial cultural activists and institution-builders, invited him to head the nascent National School of Drama. Giving up his circle of colleagues in Mumbai theatre, he moved to the capital and embarked on a new phase of his life and work. The rocky massifs in the drawings that he exhibited in Delhi when he was 39 evoke Purana Qila and Feroze Shah Kotla, historic sites where the artist, in his role as theatre-maker, staged his grand productions of Dharamvir Bharti바카라�s post-apocalyptic verse play, Andha Yug, and Girish Karnad바카라�s political allegory, Tughlaq, during these years. To this early-1960s body of work belong, also, landscapes that double as seascapes, gravid nudes that rejected the coyness of the objectified female body, still life arrangements infused with the mystery of a sacred rite.

Of all re-discoveries, it is the prodigy who ren­ounced his early path who most compels our attention. Viewing these works many decades after they were produced, we marvel at their intellectual confidence and artistic ambition. This is not the usual 바카라�promising바카라� work of a beginner or a dilettante. On the contrary, we are offered evidence of the mature, evolving vision of an artist in advance of his peers. Alkazi바카라�s art takes its place in that larger drama of anti-colonial self-assertion by which artists and intellectuals from the former colonial per­ipheries assumed their proper place in the world, speaking from emergent centres, even 바카라�off-centres바카라�, in the memorably defiant definition applied by the Nig­e­rian-American curator Okwui Enwezor. What turn might Indian art have taken, had Alkazi continued actively as a painter? What fresh stimuli or startling breakthroughs might he have proposed? How might his continuing experiments have challenged his confreres to keep up?

(The author is a poet, art critic and curator. Opening Lines: Ebrahim Alkazi, Works 1948-1971)