Read Of The Week (March 3 to March 9)

Amal Allana’s compelling biography of her father is the first carefully researched, full-length account of the life, work and times of Ebrahim Alkazi, one of the giants of 20th-century theatre and a key promoter of the visual arts movement in India.

With objective candour, Allana shares details of her parents’ relationship as they examine their marriage on entirely new terms, as a partnership of equals. Holding Time Captive shows a dynamic Alkazi in his quest to bring about inclusive, international, intercultural and interdisciplinary thinking in artistic expression. This book offers unique glimpses into an enigmatic personality whose emotionally charged life closely reflected and ran parallel to the growth and evolution of his startlingly fresh ideas and vision for a modern cultural movement in India.

Evoking the excitement of Alkazi’s student years in England, the controversies that surrounded his provocative ideas to transform the theatre movement in Bombay and later in Delhi as the director of the National School of Drama (NSD), the book charts Alkazi’s meteoric rise to the top, with his modernist staging of plays and his aim of putting Hindi theatre on the map.

Amal Allana is a theatre director of over 60 stage productions. She has been chairperson of the National School of Drama, New Delhi.