With his catchphrase “Toh phir lagay theka!”, urging the live musicians on his show to give him a beat, Zia Mohyeddin entered the consciousness of the Pakistani TV-viewing public, as a man of erudition, culture, and a genteel bravado that few, if any, have matched since.

The Zia Mohyeddin Show, a talk-show/variety programme showcasing talent from every imaginable field from all over the country, made its handsome, sophisticated, yet very approachable host, a household name in the early 1970s. Not that this was Zia’s first brush with fame or celebrity, not by a long shot.

Born in Faisalabad (then Lyallpur) in 1931, Zia’s relationship with his father Khadim Mohyeddin was sometimes strained, but he seemed to have inherited much of what would inform his personal and professional life, from him.

As Zia himself wrote, “In all my travels, I have met no one outside the musical profession who cared so intensely about music. My father mused that countless treasures would lay in store for me if I learnt to appreciate music. It took me a very long time to discover that he was right.”

Moreover, he shared with Mohyeddin Senior a love for the English language, as well as the dramatic arts. While studying at the Government College, Lahore, Zia — a prize-winning Urdu debater for the college team — tried to audition for the institution’s much-lauded dramatics club, but “was turned away on the grounds (which I find as ludicrous now as I did then) that debaters were not welcome.”

Perhaps all for the better though, for not long after, following stints at both Radio Pakistan and Radio Australia, he found himself on his way to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London (Rada), where he studied from 1953 to 1956.

After early roles in productions of Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Julius Caesar, Zia made his West End debut in A Passage To India in 1960 (he would reprise his role as Dr. Aziz in a BBC television production of the E.M. Forster novel, in 1965). He also made his first onscreen appearance in a part in David Lean’s Oscar-winning epic, Lawrence of Arabia. More work on stage, television and film followed, including Behold a Pale Horse (1964) and Khartoum (1966).

Zia also often found himself in esteemed company of actors, writers, intellectuals whom he himself had admired for years. As a student he had spent time with Dylan Thomas, and later Peter Ustinov became a good friend.

In the late 1960s, Zia returned to Pakistan when he was invited to form and run the PIA Arts and Dance Academy.

It thrived under his hands-on leadership, receiving critical plaudits for its promotion of the classical and folk arts of the country. In the early 1970s, he started his eponymous show on PTV, and also met and married acclaimed Kathak dancer Naheed Siddiqui.

Of his iconic show, Zia said, “The significant aspect of a talk-show is to make people speak, speak the truth, something rare in Pakistan where people are used to hiding facts.”

After stardom in the West, Zia was now also a huge star in his home country, but the political upheaval that saw the derailment of democracy in Pakistan in the late 1970s, convinced him he had to go back to England, as room for both, dissent and art, and their practitioners, had been greatly reduced at home.

He left, and picked up where he had left off in Britain, returning to film and television, including the big-budget adaptation of The Jewel in the Crown, as well as Family Pride, the first major TV series based upon the lives of Britain’s South Asian communities. He also produced and hosted Central Television’s multicultural variety show Here and Now, on which old chum Ustinov also appeared for an interview.

But Pakistan was never far from his thoughts, and he was greatly disturbed by the ‘ideological brainwash’ of his nation. He wrote later in his collection of essays, titled A Carrot is a Carrot: “Give any organisation power to generate beliefs and it will make, within twenty years, the majority of the population believe that two and two make five. So much for an authoritarian state, but even in a democracy governments tend to control thought… The power of authority over belief in the present day is vastly greater than before. No one can deny, in face of evidence, that it is easy to produce a population of fervent patriots. It ought to be equally easy to produce a population of sane, thinking people, but authorities do not wish to do so, since then it would be difficult to admire those in authority.”

Nevertheless, in the mid-1980s Zia started a tradition that in the years since has come to be a landmark of the cultural landscape of Lahore: his annual, year-end evening of recitation of poetry and prose of the greats of literature, the audience for which is a fiercely loyal (and growing) one.

For over twenty years, Zia did not miss this very special date. Bapsi Sidhwa wrote, “I have attended his readings in Lahore. I hesitate to call them readings; they are presentations of artistry that sound the mystical and emotional depths of the Urdu poets and Western writers whose work he reads from. He can transport an audience to a state of exaltation as naturally as he can move it to tears, or render it weak with laughter.”

He wrote two more books, Theatrics and The God of My Idolatry: Memories and Reflections. In addition to his dramatic repertoire, he was also among the finest exponents of the Marsiya elegy, and his recitations of Mir Anees, Josh Malihabadi and Mustafa Zaidi would air regularly on local television stations during Muharram.

Having returned to Pakistan in the mid-1990s, Zia was again approached by the Pakistan government to set up the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) in Karachi. This was 2005. Zia, now divorced from Siddiqui and remarried to Azra Zaidi, accepted the offer and joined the academy as its chairperson.

The past nearly two decades have been spent imparting his enviable knowledge, culled from over fifty years of experience as performer, director, and writer, to the young students of Napa. In the last couple of years, he took on the role of president emeritus at the academy, but continued to hold regular classes on diction and other theatrical disciplines.

Zia wrote in the introduction to one of his books, “I have had my share of triumphs and disasters, setbacks and jubilations. I have never been in any doubt that the compulsive irrational human instinct — the Need to Act — gives rise to more disappointments than anything else, but I’d rather live through these than own a chain of Walmarts. The moment of elation as you step forward to take a bow and hear the surge of applause rise to a crescendo, compensates for all the frustrations that a theatrical career, necessarily, entails.“Requiescat in pace.

Published in Dawn, February 14th, 2023



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