An Epic Act

IT WAS 1963 AND India had just lost a war. A man from Bombay turned the ruins of Feroze Shah Kotla, Delhi, into a stage for an epic play about the cost of violence. This was my guru, Ebrahim Alkazi, a director with an eye for the theatrical, who created his produc­tion of Andha Yug, a production that changed the course of Hindi theatre forever.

India had just lost a war with China. The Cold War was rag­ing and the atom bomb was the new shape of fear. Alkazi had chosen Andha Yug, set during the last days of the Kurukshetra war, when Ashwatthama strode in rage, and prepared to use the ultimate weapon to annihilate mankind.

It was not just the play’s topicality, its anti-war thrust, that drew Alkazi to it. The shift to Delhi had somewhat destabilized my father, bringing him face to face with the fact that the cosmo­politan temperament he had cultivated in Bombay and abroad were clearly insufficient to understand the vast transformations taking place across the subcontinent. Restless and uneasy, he in­stinctively reached back to source material, searching for scripts that would help him understand the origins of Indic culture. What drives the country? What makes its people tick? What were their thoughts and value systems based on? Alkazi tried to shrug off the baggage of European modernism he was carrying, embarking now on a foundational journey towards a deeper ‘discovery of India’.

Besides a formal study of Hindi, Alkazi simultaneously began to tackle the root language, Sanskrit, a fact that added considerable weight to his already legendary reputation of being unrelenting in his pursuit of knowledge. As a journalist mentioned, “Rising at 4 a.m., Ebrahim Alkazi sits on his terrace swaying back and forth and chanting lines from the Mahab­harata . . . he is being taught by a Guru so that he can do justice to his play Andha Yug . . .”

His personal library held key works on India such as Epics, Myths and Legends of India by Paul Thomas, James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Verrier Elwin’s The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin, Stella Kramrisch’s The Art of India Through the Ages, etc. Alkazi now realized that though these were truly great Indologists, their observations were at times coloured by an Orientalist perspective. He sought the views of younger Indian scholars by attending lectures and reading books and articles by historians such as Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib and Bipin Chandra. Moti Chandra’s comprehensive account of the costumes of India, Mohan Khokar’s scholarship on Indian dance, Pramod Kale’s contemporary understanding of the Natyashastra and the research into Sanskrit drama by V Raghavan brought forth a fresh understanding of India’s com­plex culture through its manifestations in the various art forms.

By 1962, at the age of thirty-seven, Alkazi had not only seen the great architectural monuments of India, he had also travelled extensively across Europe. He now began to look at the origins, sources, iconography, history and sociology of India in an informed and meaningful manner, making the next five decades his most intense period of study. From pre-historic times to the twentieth century, each project Alkazi undertook (in theatre and/or the visual arts) became an opportunity for him to study and uncover one more layer in the culture of this subcontinent. Here was a lifelong student who never stopped absorbing knowledge and was systematically piecing together the vast mosaic of thought and ideas upon which he gradually began to graft his understanding of Indian modernity. What is interesting is that at each stage he expressed his newly acquired knowledge not theoretically but in the palpable, creative terms of a theatre production or later, in his curation of exhibitions. These creative endeavours give us a glimpse into the long jour­ney of self-discovery he had undertaken to ‘be’ an Indian and also towards ‘becoming’ an Indian.

Alkazi, therefore, regarded both Andha Yug and Aashad Ka Ek Din as source plays. Through them, he sought to uncover many fundamental aspects of India’s core identity. Through Andha Yug, Alkazi came closer to learning about India’s value system and philosophy as explored in the Mahabharata myth, while Aashad gave him an appreciation of the artistic sensibility of the great Sanskrit poet–dramatist Kalidasa, India’s veritable Shakespeare. Interestingly, Aashad also lent itself to examining India’s rural reality (as did Premchand’s Godan, which Alkazi would adapt for the stage the following year in 1964 as Hori).

Staging a production like Andha Yug challenged Alkazi tremendously, both as a director and as a stage designer. He realized that most Indians had grown up with stereotypical visual impressions of characters from the Mahabharata and Ramayana. These impressions were by and large imitations of how the nineteenth-century artist Ravi Varma had repeatedly represented them in his calendars and paintings, and which the Natak companies further endorsed and popularized in their depictions of mythological characters in dramas. One of Alkazi’s challenges lay in attempting to exorcize such en­trenched iconography from public memory.

As he argued, “His (Ravi Verma’s) vapid, sentimental, melo­dramatic visualizations of scenes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in a tasteless Victorian manner have surely noth­ing to do with the great periods of Indian art. One has only to compare the Mahabharata frieze at the Kailasa Temple, Ellora, with Ravi Varma’s anaemic, pseudo-academic interpretations to see what one means.”

“. . . How to restore the masculinity, the dignity, the direct quality, the physical energy and the monumental stature of characters such as Dhritarashtra, Ashwatthama, Duryodhana, Sanjay, Yuyutsu and Gandhari?” he asked himself.

“The only way to do so was to go directly to the characters themselves, firmly rejecting the tinsel interpretation they have suffered in art and theatre and summoning them up anew out of our knowledge of human emotions and out of our own experience of life. Only then could we begin to see these characters as archetypes and not merely models of clay venerated in empty platitudes.”

In order for the actors to visualize the dignity and loneliness of such archetypes, Alkazi referred them to classical Indian sculpture and to Biblical characters and incidents.

Another directorial challenge was to discover a theatrical form that could project the epic sweep and power without turning into a Hollywood-style extravaganza. “It is not grand lavish sets or elaborate, expensive costumes that can give the full weight and substance of ideas of universal significance, depicted through the actions of almost super-human characters. This can be realized only through the creation of a specific style.”

In his 1965 essay ‘Style in Theatre’, the word ‘style’ was publicly used by Alkazi for the first time. It perhaps meant little or nothing to most other contemporary directors, but to Alkazi and Roshen Alkazi, a unity of ‘style’ was the ultimate criterion on which a well-realized production could be judged.

The director was to convey his ideas to his team of collabora­tors—the stage designer, costume designer, lighting designer, makeup designer, music composer, choreographer, etc.—all of whom would then need to fuse their aesthetic treatment towards creating a single, unified stylistic approach. In time, such careful­ly conceived and structured performances came to be regarded as independent artworks in themselves, elevating the position and status of the director to one that was on par with the author.

Clearly, Alkazi was introducing the idea that theatre was a performance art, not literature performed on stage! He was creating a language of performance that was distinct from the language of words. It was this art of performance that Alkazi was teaching his students. In doing such large and challenging productions, Alkazi’s students had the opportunity to observe him at rehears­als as this new type of director, a conductor of multiple mediums.

What they also observed was that he was not teaching them to stand centre stage and declaim lines or become ‘real’ characters; he was teaching the actor to be restrained, to hold back and to regard himself as only one of the mediums through which meaning and emotion were being imparted. Lighting a scene in a particular way, for example, could create mood and emotion; the physical composition of characters with one another was capable of creating telling relation­ships; an actor’s relationship to the scale of the performance space could evoke qualities like power or loneliness. The mod­ern actor needed to understand that he was not the sole or cen­tral means of communicating meaning on stage, he was only ‘one’ of the elements in the grand design of the production.

Likewise, modern plays were no longer about the trials and tribulations of great individual characters but increasingly about entire societies, races, different classes or genders, and it was in the complex relationships between such groups that the meaning lay. Therefore, actors now had to earn to play as ‘an ensemble’, rather than as ‘stars’.

With this kind of training in mind, it is not difficult to under­stand why Alkazi insisted on teaching through an ‘integrated’ syllabus through which students were trained in all aspects of theatre, from sets, costumes, masks, makeup, lighting, etc. Within a few years of his arrival, he extended the NSD diploma course from two to three years—the first two years with gen­eral, integrated courses, and the third devoted to one of three specializations—acting, direction or stage management. The idea of an integrated course was completely novel in 1963.

Apart from the subjects offered, an exciting learning experience was to observe Alkazi direct and design productions. Many from the Andha Yug cast alone, such as Mohan Maha­rishi, Om Shivpuri, BV Karanth, Ram Gopal Bajaj and KM Sontakke, who were basically actors, later developed into extremely compe­tent directors, inspired by this experience.

Alkazi was one of those highly gifted and creative individuals who took care of most of the aesthetic considerations of his produc­tions himself. He had trained himself to be accomplished in all these disciplines and therefore needed no collaborators with the exception of a costume designer, a role that Roshen filled. She remained his one constant and key collaborator throughout his career, with him relying on and trusting her judge­ment completely.

It was in designing costumes for the stage, more than anything else, that my mother’s own creative abilities found their fullest expression. The process began with her sitting patiently at my father’s rehears­als, trying to gauge the particular style that he was attempting to fashion. What were the thoughts and imperatives that guided a director’s approach to a specific play? Was it the socio–political reality that he wished to foreground? Was his handling of the crowd scenes going to be in bold, sweeping strokes, with masses of extras moving in blocks? Or was he attempting to express the inner, tentative, febrile lives of individual char­acters? Or was it a dark, womb-like, clammy earthiness that the costumes would require to evoke to help create a context for the sexually loaded theme of Lorca’s Yerma, for example?

Wondering what kind of historical period she should set Andha Yug in, Roshen picked up a clue when Elk casually mentioned that he was going to discard classical music because “the aalap was too refined and sophisticated; instead, I have chosen primitive-sounding folk and tribal chants for their feel of ‘hordes’, of the raucous, hard-pressed cries of human beings at the end of their tether.”

Referencing back to the costumes of one of the early periods in Indian history, the Mauryan, she decided to create a style that was a blend of the quality found in the sculpture at Sanchi and Bharhut, along with primitive and tribal accessories found in the jewellery of North- eastern hill tribes, where bones and beads rather than gemstones were used decoratively.

For the basic male attire, she opted for dhotis made of rough, thick, hand-spun fabric. Bare chests were partially covered by full-length cloaks held together with leather and metal fasten­ings. Leather sandals for the warriors were used to accentuate stride, while leather wristlets gave a certain masculine accent to hand gestures.

Gandhari was the only female character. Though majestic in her bearing, Roshen gave her no jewellery or accessories to denote her status. Her costume consisted of a simple lehenga, a long-sleeved tunic, and a black shawl—all made of undecorated, thick handspun cloth. She wore her hair loose, giving a certain unkempt wildness to her look. Gone were the mukuts (crowns), elaborate jewellery and gota-trimmed satin costumes used in Natak company productions! Here we saw a fierce breed of men and women— bleeding, dishevelled, war-torn, with ravaged faces and shattered hopes, “at the end of their tether”.

However, the costumes were not literally torn, bloodied, burned or in rags, which would have reduced the stature of these characters to a realistic scale. Alkazi needed to maintain the epic, universal quality of the poem, to not let us forget that this was a huge war on a cosmic scale—a war that had robbed human beings of their morals, ideals and values.

Roshen realized her costumes had to hold their own when seen against the dominating environment that Alkazi had chosen for this production, the site he had discovered during his morning walks to various historical monuments.

“I was very careful in choosing a site such as Feroze Shah Kotla. Its towering massive rough-hewn walls—pitted, scarred and broken—exuded a brooding, somewhat oppressive atmosphere, which was just right for the play. There was a quality which the elements, the sun, the wind, the rain, added to trees and stones over a long period of time giving them a living char­acter which can never be artificially achieved within a theatre. The very authenticity of such a background forces the actor to confront himself and to act with honesty and sincerity, with a total lack of artificiality in performance as well as in costume and make-up.”

Alkazi felt the site itself would allow him to explore ‘space and scale’ in performance.

“In the performance itself everything becomes a matter of scale: the scale of the human figures; the scale of the 10 ft. wheel in relation to the great flight of steps, to that of the rearing walls behind; the scale of the actor’s gesture in rela­tion to all these; the scale of the human voice (undistorted by microphones) in relation to the characters they are depicting and the open space in which the words must be spoken and yet remain expressive.”

Alkazi himself summarized his production thus: “Finally to see events portrayed in this manner in the open air against the vast sky with its moving clouds, gives a sense of the remorseless and inevitable passage of time, of human ac­tion as an infinitesimal part of the limitless sky and the inexo­rable cycle of nature. The cries of birds in the night, the distant barking of dogs, the rustling of trees, the gentle caress of the night-breeze imbue the experience with authenticity . . . I see Gandhari small, lost, lonely, a mere speck under a huge suf­focating bowl of the sky, a frenzied, protesting speck, a cursing atom in the act of explosion, detonating a chain reaction of vengeance against the whole Yadav clan . . . minute, helpless, unable to stop what has been started. But being human, open to suffering, to realizing her part in the terrible game.”

For Alkazi, fratricidal war between brothers in the Mahabharata rekindled memories of the divide between Hindus and Muslims, between India and Pakistan. Feroz Shah Kotla was drenched in this history. It was one of the sites where thousands of refugees from Pakistan had languished for many months. Much like the char­acters in Andha Yug, the refugees saw themselves as either victims or wit­nesses to hatred.

The impact of the eight perfor­mances in October 1963 was huge. This was the story of the aftermath of the Partition, which had played itself out within the living memory of the spectators. Each performance brought in a larger audience. Such were the crowds that Pandit Nehru himself asked to attend a performance that was making waves. Alkazi’s stature soared overnight!

The third bell rang and there was still no sight of the PM. He was held up in a meeting! Alkazi was being himself when he insisted on beginning on time, PM or no PM! Minutes later, Panditji and a few others had to be led to their seats in the dark. Flurrying security men did not know where to station them­selves. The play continued for some time without a break, and then suddenly cries of ‘Maaro! Kaato!’ rent the air. The audience froze. Security men who had been absorbed in the play sprang up to surround the PM, as they thought there was an attempt on his life! Actors who were shouting these slogans were barred from entering the stage! Alkazi swiftly and quietly reassured the security that this was part of a scene in the play. With so much drama both on stage and off, there was no question that Alkazi’s Andha Yug would be long remembered.

(This is an edited excerpt from Holding Time Captive: A Biography of Ebrahim Alkazi by Amal Allana, releasing on March 11)

Andha YugEbrahim AlkaziGirish KarnadHindi theatreMeena PetheNSDRakt Kalyan