Larger than life Zia Mohyeddin no more | The Express Tribune
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Sleeves would unroll, postures would be corrected, whispers would be held back, someone leaning on to someone else would find firm footing, and fumbling sentences would take flight as soon as the word would get out that Zia Mohyeddin had entered the building.
In the past decade or so, the Hindu Gymkhana premises that now houses the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) dared not to echo improper delivery and incomplete sentences.
For the winds might conspire like the many Greek deities and inform the Dionysus in charge about the sin, the only difference was that in return the sinners would not receive a punishment or a curse but rather a lesson in how to be the best version of themselves.
Such was the charm, vibe and often ‘terror’ of Mohyeddin’s presence, who was the president of the institute and the person primarily responsible for teaching voice and diction.
Before Napa he was known as Pakistan’s greatest thespian, broadcaster, and actor, a master orator who could summon Shakespeare’s tricksters and Ghalib’s angels all in one breath, one sentence, that too with the comfort of a marathon runner, breathing new life into dead poets who once formed a living society.
A Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (Rada) graduate, who performed hundreds of shows at West End, produced a number of successful TV programmes and productions, before returning to Pakistan to serve its culture, language, and art.
The Laylpur-born Mohyeddin has now left the building and the world’s stage after a successful fight of 91 years. He was laid to rest in Karachi after his funeral prayers were offered at Imambargah Yathrib in Defence Housing Society Phase IV.
In his time before entering the building and after leaving it, the master thespian was able to cultivate a heritage full of cultural richness, top-notch programming, immaculate expression, deep thinking and a bittersweet relationship with the next generation of performers.
While it will be his immersive recitations and all the talking his eyes did with a slender glass frame resting on his nose that he will most fondly be remembered for, his greatest contribution to Pakistan would be all the students he taught and mentored. Though few in number, and perhaps not as passionate as their mentor, if these students, many of whom are now a part of mainstream media, can only be parts of the whole that Mohyeddin was and represented, then what is to come would not be as crass and ‘vulgar’ as Mohyeddin foresaw.
In a 2013 conversation with The Express Tribune, he pointed out that talent was not the issue in Pakistan, a lack of professionalism was. “In Pakistan, if someone is playing a drunkard, he feels it is a necessity to drink before the performance even if the role did not demand it – just so he can get his act together. Drinking is not the real problem, the core issue is the lack of professionalism,” he said.
As much as Moheyddin despised the gradual decline of society’s aesthetic sense and artistic standards, he kept on coming back to the Pakistani media ecosystem, if not as a mainstream actor then an independent artist and the voice behind some of the most successful ad and social campaigns
In 1992, he also worked in Jamil Dehalvi’s Immaculate Conception in which he played the role of Khwaja Sira, the cast also included Shabana Azmi, James Wilby and Mellisa Leo.
He also wrote three books, the most popular amongst them ‘A carrot is a carrot’, which was published in 2008 and featured personal and professional memories with a dash of literature and theatre. He kept on doing recitations throughout his career, sometimes for private media and other times for record labels or literature festivals.
At the same time, he never left the traditional stage and every year one would see him direct one of the great works for Napa, the last two being Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and King Lear in Urdu.
In 2013, he also directed ‘Waiting for Godot’ in English and was incredibly clear that the reason he chose his daughter Aliya to play the ghost was strictly out of professional necessity.
All these salient aspects are mere fragments of Mohyeddin’s powerful and surgically picky catalogue of work, some of which took a toll on his personal life too, which he talks about rather openly in the 2022 documentary on his life ‘From a lover to some beloved’.
It can easily be said that a generation of artists to come will be like dwarves to his gigantic aura. Mohyeddin’s combination of taste, culture, wit, wisdom, language and the urge to transfer all that into newer saplings required grace, patience and a Sisyphean commitment to the cause.
No wonder, he only had bad things to say about contemporary Pakistani TV and the deteriorating state of the Urdu language at use in both news transmissions and entertainment programming.
Such commitment to one's love for the arts needs both disconnect and disenchantment from the mainstream and only visionaries can translate that indifference into a lot more than just a personality type or a flex; Moheyddin turned his dissatisfaction into an academy.
Let alone talent, show me a man, woman, or a non-binary stakeholder in the contemporary creative scene, with similar principles and I will happily accept that Hum TV dramas have empowered women, Tehzeeb Haafi is the natural consequence of our poetry journey, Tabish Hashmi is Moin Akhtar’s replacement and Thumri Dadra did not die of an organised crime at the hand of music gharanas.
Puritans might feel that all that is crass or ordinary about today’s cultural landscape should not be mentioned in the same breath as Moheyddin but this kitsch and almost scripted glorification of the formula is what the master actually stood against. All these are symptoms or perhaps eventualities of a time that he saw coming and lived through in his own uniquely elitist and occasionally ‘condescending’ ways.
The master thespian had such a deep connection to the arts and more importantly imparting artistic and cultural education that hardly a week before his sad passing, the now gracefully wrinkled and slender Mohyeddin took Napa stage to share important lessons for aspiring artists.
“Our societies still have a lingering suspicion that actors, and musicians too for that matter, do not have a proper job and therefore do not do any real work. We still regard an actor to be a vagabond and a wastrel. I am aware that our efforts can only bear fruit in a less intolerant society. I see no way out of the mediocrity which currently rules our perceptions and imaginations unless we give up making compromises. We are now living in a devastatingly tortuous period. I can offer you no words of wisdom that can mitigate the anguish we are surrounded with. I can only hold on to my belief that work is life and there is no point in life other than work.”
With these fine words, Mohyeddin clinched our society’s many hypocrisies in his frail fist, out in the open sky, in front of students, parents and teachers. Those who understood him felt a balm on their bruises and those who did not, marveled at the comfort, clarity and crispness with which a 91-year-old can hold his forte. He may have passed away, but his bewitching voice will stay with us like the ghost of a rich past.
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