Rahaab Allana

PARAMJOT WALIA

Your grandfather Ebrahim Alkazi is considered one of the most powerful voices in modern Indian theatre, your mother Amal Allana is also a senior theatre director and two time Chairperson of the
National School of Drama, your father Nissar Allana is an eminent stage and lighting designer. Theatre runs in your blood, still it never fascinated you? On one hand, you are dealing with ontemporaneous images, on the other, you are the curator of the Alkazi Collection of Photography, a collection of 19th Century photographs built over the years. What do you connect well to?
Tell us something about the last photograph that you have collected? I acted quite terribly in one of my sister’s plays, that was the only time I was involved with theatre. I was more inclined towards archiving works. Photographs are means through which an entire generation creates sense of their own world giving a very powerful insight into memories and histories. I was interested in knowing how a photograph could be read to understand different kinds of cultures. The Alkazi Collection reflects the theatrical aspect too. I have to say an Alkazi in a family would usually come once but
many different aspects of Alkazi can come in different aspects of the family. The more you develop the contemporary practice more you tend to drift away from the 19th century photography and if you look at history of modernism and post modernism then you should realise that what happened 200 years ago would somehow repeat itself with the passage of time. Last issue of ‘Pix’ was on
gender. The images of gender have been circulating since 2nd century B.C. whether scribbled in caves or photographs. Reinventing how images of men and women have been depicted over time allows us to understand how the cultures have developed over times.