Sarveshwar dayal saxenda biography of william shakespeare
From ‘Othello’ to ‘Antigone’ to ‘Andha Yug’, Ebrahim Alkazi Did Them All
Gerson da Cunha
Alkazi’s first contact with the theatre came after school in St Vincent’s, Poona, when he joined St Xavier’s College in Bombay. Here, the Shakespeare Society met once a week, directed by Sultan ‘Bobby’ Padamsee, a towering figure just back from Oxford after dodging the German submarines on the way. Soon, Alkazi found himself cast in Padamsee productions: Othello (opening on the bedchamber scene with Othello slaying Desdemona, and then proceeding in flashbacks), Macbeth and Twelfth Night. Later would come Oscar Wilde’s Salome and Lajos Biro’s God and Kings.
Here was a Poona youth, feeling a bit of a yokel, cast among the sophisticates of Bombay. Yet there was no reason for the discomfort. He was brought up in a family of affluent Arab merchants. His father never learned an Indian language or felt at home in English but Alkazi had been sent to a prestigious Jesuit school. He shared a reasonably similar background with his fellow ‘Shakespeareans’.
By the age of 23, this man had stood on its head the artistic life of a very cosmopolitan city, and not just in theatre. Poetry, prose, painting, criticism and an active salon of young thinkers and creators were all part of Padamsee’s disruptive sweep. Sadly, the flame burned too brightly to last very long.
In 1952, I acted in Alkazi’s wonderful production of Anouilh’s Antigone. Alkazi elicited two of the finest performances that I have seen anywhere from his principals, Pheroza Cooper (Antigone) and Hamid Sayani (Creon). Alkazi himself was the Chorus. It was a carefully graded exercise of rising intensity of performance in this new version of the Greek classic. It was an instructive technical and emotional experience for us all.
Pheroza was a composed young woman. We watched attentively as Alkazi provoked her with examples and parallels to heights of fury and violence at a great di I approach poetry with a sense of devotion. There are rituals I like to adhere to. When I am working on a poem, my day opens with it and closes with it. I tend to think about it all the time, though I have other commitments too, not least accounting. I used to wonder if artists are all obsessive about their arts, but I have found that I am not that way when I am painting. Painting, to me, is not as compulsive a desire as poetry. When I paint, I can set the paper aside, but it is not so when I am writing, at least not with as much ease and forbearance. I am not a watercolourist but I am reminded of Derek Walcott, who said, “I’m content to be a moderately good watercolourist. But I’m not content to be a moderately good poet. That’s a very different thing.” I write into the night since the morning is often lost to other engagements, but also because it tends to be quieter and stiller than other phases of the day. I am easily distracted by sound and movement; it is why I face a wall when I write; it is why I have a fan in my room that is loud enough to drown out other sounds and consistent enough to not intrude into my head. And despite all these arrangements, I find myself writing, reading, and revising, at odd points along the day. I believe all writers of poetry are also keen readers of poetry. When I started writing poetry, the poets I read were all deceased and predominantly European. I read William Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire, C.P. Cavafy, and later, Federico García Lorca, Fernando Pessoa, Osip Mandelstam, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anna Akhmatova, Paul Celan, Wisława Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz, and eventually, Homer and Dante, among others. I read classical Chinese poetry through Arthur Waley’s translations, Japanese poetry through Kenneth Rexroth’s translations, Prakrit poems translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Sanskrit poets lik . Your search returned 11 results.
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The Poetry Issue 2022: A Morning in Eden and other poems
‘I approach poetry with a sense of devotion’