Artist, curator, connoisseur

The flamboyant Ebrahim Alkazi has loomed larger than life across India’s cultural landscape since the 1950s

June 04, 2016 04:49 pm | Updated September 16, 2016 10:36 am IST

E. Alkazi at his studio in Matheran, 1947. Photo: The Alkazi Collection of Art

E. Alkazi at his studio in Matheran, 1947. Photo: The Alkazi Collection of Art

Ebrahim Alkazi was a man in love with his public. In the five decades of a practice that spread from Bombay to Delhi, theatre to art, criticism to connoisseurship, Alkazi educated, cajoled, persuaded and enlightened his public, with a fundamental driving belief, in the value of modernity. At the height of his powers, he has been compared to India’s greatest cultural figures of the 20th century, a Satyajit Ray or a Shombhu Mitra. One may argue that Alkazi went a step further than his peers in the domains of cinema and traditional theatre, in that he created the protocols of viewership in areas where none had existed.

When I came to Delhi at the end of the 1970s, the Alkazi era in theatre had already waned. The Emergency and its aftermath of invidious politics, now full blown in cultural institutions, had taken its toll. Alkazi had resigned from the National School of Drama (NSD) in 1977, even as his legacy continued to flourish through his students. Sitting in the shade of the Meghdoot theatre, a space he had built for the NSD Repertory, watching the deliciously played-out narrative of Meera and Peera in Begum ka Takia or Amal Allana’s beautifully-crafted Mahabhoj , Alkazi’s imprint appeared intact. As the decades have unwound, however, institutional crises have cut at the roots of creativity, and the grandeur of the Alkazi era, resonating from the ramparts of Purana Qila, has long been silenced.

On the occasion of Alkazi’s 90th birthday, his family commissioned a lavishly illustrated and researched volume, released earlier this year, called Ebrahim Alkazi Directing Art: The Making of a Modern Indian Art World . What the two-volume, somewhat more modest publication Enact , edited by Reeta Sondhi and Sunita Paul, did for Alkazi as a man of theatre at the end of the 1970s is now attempted on a much grander scale for Alkazi as artist, curator and connoisseur. Certainly, if one is to consider art and theatre as a binary with shared but diverging traditions, a case for interesting comparisons arises. In hindsight, would it be accurate to say that Alkazi’s forays into art, an area which grew without much government patronage, more successfully fulfilled his quest for a modernist spirit and aesthetic?

Although cinema was a cosmopolitan medium in its aspirations from the 1930s, and theatre an instrument of nationalism, both of which he was abundantly familiar with in Bombay, Alkazi chose a somewhat different, more challenging route. Already in Bombay as an artist and promoter of Theatre Unit, which he ran from the terrace of his building, Alkazi had developed a parallel interest in art. Perhaps Alkazi’s interest in art was even above theatre and cinema, because he realised its potential as an attempt at a modern language. In this, his efforts have an inspired, even zealous aspect. In the late 1940s, accompanied by his wife Roshen, Alkazi went to study art in England, aware of the potential of the Progressive artists, among who F.N. Souza was a roommate and close companion.

In an interview with Yashodhara Dalmia, Alkazi speaks of carrying “a handcart full of Souza’s paintings and going up and down Oxford Street and Bond Street, trying to sell them”. In a series of eight exhibitions titled ‘This is Modern Art’, held at Bombay’s Jehangir Art Gallery in the 1950s, he used prints and excavated nearly 30 Picasso original works in the city, to display and build his case, engaging his viewers, compelling a broadening of the horizons. Considering that the Indian triennale was to be launched only in 1968, and that Marg , under Mulk Raj Anand, was not to commit to reviews of contemporary art exhibitions till 1974, Alkazi’s approach to art, both as educator and promoter, seemed far ahead of his peers.

Roshen had run Black Partridge Gallery in Delhi establishing enduring personal links with artists in the process. When Alkazi set up Art Heritage in 1977, in the Triveni complex basement, he could hardly have anticipated the market’s rise and collapse, and glittering sales-fuelled openings that would follow just two decades later. During this period, the Alkazis nurtured Indian art; their conviction in artists like K.G. Subramanyan, Souza and Arpita Singh helped establish a gallery run with a deep seriousness of purpose. Each show the Alkazis promoted was backed by a catalogue and documentation protocols that have been abandoned by several gallerists, particularly in the aftermath of the economic downturn. Even as younger galleries and museums opted for chrome and glass frontages, and socially-networked openings, the Alkazis’ exceptionalism showed through. Certainly, the sustained practice of a well-calibrated framing and hanging, engaging a critic and publishing an essay (which was then carried in an annual Art Heritage collection of essays) put in place the protocols of gallery display.

Alkazi predicted his modernity — and his aesthetic — on an elegant, sweeping mix of the West and the Indian-Asian traditions. In the gathering together of talents as diverse as A. Ramachandran (and the ambitious Yayati project he commissioned), Sudhir Patwardhan and Benode Behari Mukherjee, Tyeb Mehta and Arpita Singh, Alkazi appears particularly committed to the singular ‘truth’ of each artistic practice. In the eclectic mix of artists, he does not demonstrate any of the angst around issues of indigenism that propelled the arguments of Group 1890, or indeed determined the distance from internationalism among thinkers like J. Swaminathan and Geeta Kapur in the early 1970s.

Alkazi curated the Festival of India exhibition, ‘India: Myth and Reality’, along with Geeta Kapur and Richard Bartholomew, even as he seems to have stood outside some of the searing debates that had preoccupied artists and writers through the 1960s to the 80s. Perhaps the ease with which he embraced the vernacular, its varied sensibilities and aesthetic intents in theatre made for an easy transition to art. What comes across, in his active engagement with artists from Bombay, Baroda, Shantiniketan and Delhi, in his easy accommodations of the modern-international and the vernacular-contemporary, is that the indexicality of an art work was predicated on its staging. Visuality for Alkazi — with all its potential for high drama — was critical to the reading of an exhibition. His restaging of Yayati in 2002, at Shridharani gallery, and the magnificent opus of Souza’s works in 1996, which rendered the exhibition church-like and therefore allowed for the unfolding of both the sacred and its profanation, are two instances. And in his relative distance from the raging arguments around the modern, we have already an alternative understanding of an Indian modernity, amongst which his place is clear: Alkazi’s position, in his own mind, as world citizen and world artist was never in question, and he moved with ease between art forms, picking choosing and refining at will.

Alkazi continued to be associated with Art Heritage till 2012. However his most influential period would have been from the mid-70s to the 90s, a period that marked the coming of newer global shifts, with their preference for new media. At a time when Nalini Malani had branched into video and painted mylar, or Vivan Sundaram was in the vanguard of installation art, Alkazi maintained art and media as discrete categories. Thus while he made two films on Somnath Hore, led a fine programme on Doordarshan on art criticism, and co-curated the exhibitions at Festivals of India, Alkazi tended to view painting and sculpture as distinct disciplines. Even though he participated as actor, painter, auteur, director, speaker, writer, he played these out as separate roles. In that, he has been a modernist to the last.

Parul Dave-Mukherji, the editor, brings to this rich volume different aspects of Alkazi’s long and dynamic career. While the book is interspersed with stills from his directorial ventures, the essays foreground Alkazi as artist, occasional critic and passionate promoter/gallerist. The seven essays trace his trajectory, from his daughter and eminent theatre director Amal Allana’s personal reminiscences of growing up in Bombay during Alkazi’s extraordinary efflorescence as a director, to extended interviews between Alkazi and Yashodhara Dalmia on aspects of his practice, and between Dave-Mukherji and K.G. Subramanyan on Alkazi as friend, gallerist and peer in the expanding world of Indian art. In addition, Shukla Sawant’s prescient, well-researched analysis of the Bombay art scene of the 1950s, and Alkazi’s position therein, Devika Singh on exhibition-making as post-Independence, post-colonial project in Alkazi’s practice, and Akansha Rastogi on the nascent conflicts around curatorial intervention and control in the 1950s, make this volume a valuable document in an area of scant research.

Gayatri Sinha is an art critic and curator based in New Delhi.

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