Tom Alter

Early life

A native of Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, India, Tom Alter is the son of American Christian missionaries of English and Scottish ancestry and has lived for years in Mumbai and the Himalayan hill station of Landour. His grandparents migrated to India from Ohio, United States in November 1916, when they arrived in Madras (now Chennai) by ship. From there, they went to Lahore by train, where they settled. His father was born in Sialkot, now in Pakistan.

After the Partition of India, his family too split into two - his grandparents remained in Pakistan while his parents moved to India. After living in Allahabad, Jabalpur and Saharanpur, they finally settled in Rajpur, Uttar Pradesh, a small town located between Dehradun and Mussoorie (in present-day Uttarakhand) in 1954. His elder sister Martha Chen has a PhD in South Asian Studies from University of Pennsylvania and teaches at Harvard and his brother John is a poet and a teacher.

As a child, Alter studied Hindi among other subjects in Mussoorie, consequently, he has occasionally been referred to as the "Blue-eyed saheb with impeccable Hindi." He was educated in Mussoorie's Woodstock School. His father taught history and English at the Christian college (E.C.C), Allahabad, and thereafter taught at a seminary in Saharanpur. In 1954, his parents started an ashram in Rajpur, called "Massihi Dhyaan Kendra" and they settled there. People of all religions came there for studies and discussions. They would initially recite biblical studies in Urdu and subsequently in Hindi (when Hindi was adopted in 1962).

At 18, Alter left for the US for higher education and studied at Yale for a year. However, he did not like the rigor of the studies at Yale and returned after a year. At the age of 19, Alter obtained work as a teacher, at St. Thomas School, Jagadhri, in Haryana. He worked here for six months, simultaneously coaching his students in cricket. Over the next two and a half years, Alter worked several jobs, teaching for a while at Woodstock School, Mussoorie and working at a hospital in America, and returning to India and continuing to work at Jagadhri. At Jagadhri, he started to watch Hindi movies at the two solitary cinema theaters near Jagadhri - Jagadhri talkies and Yamuna Nagar talkies.

It was during this time that he saw the Hindi film Aradhana, a film that he and his friends liked so much that they saw it thrice in a week's time. This viewing marked a turning point in Alter's life and watching Rajesh Khanna's and Sharmila Tagore's acting attracted young Alter to films. He contemplated pursuing an acting career and mulled over this thought for two years, after which he headed to Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, where he studied acting from 1972 to 1974 under Roshan Taneja. He confessed in a 2009 interview, "I still dream of being Rajesh Khanna. For me, in the early 1970s, he was the only hero — romantic to the core, not larger than life, so Indian and real — he was my hero; the reason I came into films and he still is." In another interview, he said, "There was something very warm about Jagadhri. I remained a teacher there until the day I watched Rajesh Khanna romance Sharmila in Aradhana. That was the beginning of my addiction to the cinema." Alter credits his accomplishments in acting to these two years at FTII, Roshan Taneja's teaching there and interactions with other students including Naseeruddin Shah, Benjamin Gilani and Shabana Azmi.

Film

Alter is fluent in Hindi, Urdu and knowledgeable of Indian culture. He can also read Urdu and is fond of Urdu shayari. He has worked for noted filmmakers like Satyajit Ray in Shatranj Ke Khilari and is remembered for his role as a British officer in Kranti. In Sardar, the 1993 film biography of Indian leader Sardar Patel, which focused on the events surrounding the partition and independence of India, Alter portrayed Lord Mountbatten of Burma. He also acted in Hollywood movie One Night with the King with Peter O'Toole.

In 1996 he appeared in the Assamese film Adajya, and in 2007 acted in the theatrical reproduction of William Dalrymple's City of Djinns alongside Zohra Sehgal and Manish Joshi Bismil. He also appeared in a solo play Maulana, based on Maulana Azad for which he has received much critical acclaim. He has also received praise for his role in the art film Ocean of An Old Man, which has been screened at film festivals around the world.

Alter has also acted in the role of a doctor in Bheja Fry, a comedy movie starring Rajat Kapoor.

In April 2011, he acted in a short film Yours, Maria directed by Chirag Vadgama playing the lead role of Matthew Chacha in the movie.

Alter has lent his voice for authorised audio autobiography of Dr. Verghese Kurien, titled The Man Who Made The Elephant Dance which was released in 2012.

TV series

Alter appeared in many Indian TV serials, including Sanvidhaan (Rajya Sabha TV), all of which were praised by audience for his acting. In Zabaan Sambhalke he played the role of a British writer, Charles Spencers, who lives in India and wants to learn Hindi language. He acted in TV series Khamosh Sa Afsana (as a Husain Baba), telecast on Doordarshan in 2014-15. In November 2014, he played Sahir Ludhianvi in a stage production based on life and work of the famous Urdu poet and film-lyricist. He also played a school teacher in Yahan Ke Hum Sikandar. Alter has also worked as the red robe guru in Mukesh Khanna's TV production Shaktiman (1998–2002). He has also played Indian characters in Indian television series, such as the long-running Junoon, in which he was the sadistic mob lord Keshav Kalsi.

Theatre

Alter is also a prolific theatre actor. In 1977 he along with Naseeruddin Shah and Benjamin Gilani formed a theatre group called Motley Productions. Their first play was Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, which was staged at Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai, on 29 July 1979. He has been performing at Prithvi Theatre ever since, his latest being an adaptation of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer's My Grandad had an Elephant which was performed on 7 June 2011. He has also worked with the New Delhi theatre group Pierrot's Troupe.

In Ghalib In Delhi he played the role of Mirza Ghalib, the great erstwhile Urdu poet.

He is the lead actor in "Once Upon A Time" a collection of five short stories presented as vignettes, directed by Sujata Soni Bali, and co-starring prominent stage actor and TV personality Sunit Tandon. The production was last staged in Mumbai on 17 June 2017.

Writing and journalism

Alter has written books including The Longest Race, Rerun at Rialto, and The Best in the World. He is also a sports journalist with a special interest in cricket, a game on which he has written extensively in publications such as Sportsweek, Outlook, Cricket Talk, Sunday Observer and Debonair. He plays cricket for a film industry team MCC (Match Cut Club), which includes Naseeruddin Shah, Satish Shah, Vishal Bhardwaj, Aamir Khan, Nana Patekar, Bhupinder Singh and Amarinder Sangha. He also wrote on cricket in Indian publications. In 1996, he was invited by friend Siraj Syed to Singapore, to do cricket commentary in Hindi, for Indian viewers, on the sports TV channel, ESPN.

Personal life

Alter married Carol Evans in 1977. They have two children together: son Jamie and daughter Afshaan. Jamie has worked as a cricket writer for ESPNcricinfo and CricBuzz and is currently sports editor with Times Of India.com . As a cricket enthusiast himself, Tom wrote columns for newspapers and journals for over ten years. He also worked as a journalist during the time and was the first to video interview Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar in 1988.

Alter is a life member of International Film And Television Club & International Film And Television Research Centre of Asian Academy of Film & Television. Alter's first cousin Stephen Alter, also born and raised in India, is an author and teacher. Both are graduates of Woodstock School, Mussoorie. In 2017, he was diagnosed with Stage IV skin cancer.