Nadira Babbar

Nadira Zaheer Babbar was born on 20 January 1948, Mumbai, India, to Syed Sajjad Zaheer and Razia Sajjad Zaheer. Her father was a communist leader and her mother was an Urdu writer. She has three sisters; Najma Ali Baquer and Naseem Bhatia are elder to her while Noor Sajjad Zaheer is younger.

Nadira Babbar married Raj Babbar, an Indian film actor, in 1975. The couple has a son, Arya Babbar, who is a budding actor and a daughter, Juhi Babbar, who is a fashion designer.

Nadira Babbar developed an affinity for the performing arts quite early on in her life. She owes her love for theater to her parents, Razia Sajjad Zaheer and Syed Sajjad Zaheer who were actively involved with ‘Indian Peoples’ Theater Association’ (IPTA) and ‘Progressive Writers’ Association’. She joined the National School of Drama (NSD) in 1968 and earned a ‘Diploma in Direction’ in 1971, under the tutelage of Ibrahim Alkazi, her instructor.

Nadira was a gold medalist at NSG and won a scholarship to go to East Germany government. There she worked at ‘Berliner Ensemble’, a theater production company founded by Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel. She won another scholarship which was awarded by the ‘National Theater of Weimer’ for pursuing with her theater education.

In the course of her training in East Germany, she worked alongside well-known theater directors like Peter Brooks, Henry Harvard, Wolfgang Heinz, Fritz Benevitz, and Ursula Kchimskye. Nadira came back to India in 1973 and took up a job as a drama teacher at Sardar Patel Vidyalaya. At the same time, she carried on working in theaters in New Delhi before relocating to Mumbai in 1988.

Nadira formed ‘Ekjute’ in 1981 in New Delhi and in the same year staged its debut production, ‘Yahudi Ki Ladki’ that gave a fillip to the Parsi theater genre. ‘Ekjute’ which has staged more than 15000 shows since its inception and introduced talented artistes to cinema, television, and theater, has raised the bar for Hindi theater. This theater group has dramatized works of many distinguished playwrights including but not limited to Eugene O’Neal, John Osborne, Albert Camus, Agha Kashmiri, Badal Sircar, and Habib Tanvir.

Nadira’s theater group, Ekjute, over the course of its existence, has worked in close cooperation with several leading lights in visual and performing arts like M.F. Hussein, Pandita Uma Dogra, and Guru Sri C.Gopalakrishnan. Some of the anniversary celebration logos’ of Ekjute were conceptualized by M.F. Hussain. She has appeared in many plays produced by her theater productions, including ‘Othello’, ‘Cross Purpose’, ‘Desire under the Elms’, ‘Tughlaq’, ‘Jasma Odhan’, ‘Sandhya Chhaya’, and ‘Begum Jaan’.