The time was 1954. There are many ways of telling a dastan, she said, How shall I begin? I don’t know which characters are more important. Where did this story start? What was the climax? Who was the heroine? How should she have ended up? And who was the hero? Who is the listener of this story and who is the narrator?”[i] – Qurratulain Hyder

The extract, allows a fleeting glimpse of quests of a narrator from the epical Urdu novel Aag ka Darya, by Qurratulain Hyder, (transcreated as River of Fire by the author). A fiction set within a historical context enveloping few centuries, and extending until the partition of the Indian subcontinent, unfolding further into the decades of post-Independence, with characters who reappear through ages to reveal the times they have lived in. This narration across a vast canvas begins in 4^th Century BC with a character Gautam Nilambar, a student of Shravasti, whose story comes to a full circle in post-Partition India. The novel takes one through an endless journey, and the reader ultimately is exposed to metaphysical mourning, where the protagonists look back at their lives to realise a vacuity that remains as a residue. One finds them grieving the absence of friends who had left for Pakistan as the story winds up, with a lasting sense of loss taking over the air. This effort to define or contain absence is an intangible act; it appears an instrument to construe something as abstract as a mark on paper, for instance, a print. It is the remnant of the weight of an object on paper, but it also means an impression, which could be the weight of memories. A mark or impression on a paper is a memory of the physical link between a tool and the ground. Similarly, Zarina’s journey as an artist to revisit old paths and unearth ideas of resting, or of home, acknowledges paper as a ground beyond its physical nature, which bears the weight of her memories. With a series of questions, which may or may not be seeking answers, Zarina’s vocabulary spreads out as maps of cities, plans of homes, architectural phrases, or simply foliage from a tree. These she has often left partly spelt, yet are fully capable of concluding the stories, of recurring desires to look for an emotional refuge. Zarina’s practice has stemmed from the ‘personal’ and perhaps, the same niche of locating the ‘personal’ within a grand narrative is present in Hyder’s novel. Put differently, how one may understand the act of mark-making without understanding the agony of exodus, the impermanence of life, relationships and possessions. Perhaps, this transience of existence makes imprints so beautiful. Zarina’s art practice resembles such layers of narration, which are puzzling in nature, never too much, or never too little, resonating Hyder, they are those ‘other ways of telling a different tale’.

When Did Home Become A Foreign Place?

Recollecting[ii] from texts that speak of Zarina’s life and practice, one can look back at 1930s’ Aligarh, a small university town in Uttar Pradesh where Zarina was born, and where her father Sheikh Abdur Rasheed taught history at Aligarh Muslim University. She grew up amongst books, with an early introduction to printed matter. Art was not a part of her formal education, Zarina completed graduation in mathematics, possibly a trigger that initiated the abstractness of numbers to steal their way into her minimal and suggestive visual language. It was the notion of the home at Aligarh that reoccurred in her works: the house, the courtyard, and the corners; they are both linguistic and visual hints, which act as points of departures, or entries into the cryptic interplay between text and image. An expression in Urdu that accompanies an intentionally simplified image of an architectural element like a floor plan, a plan of a city or a cardinal meter subscribing from an essential fraction of a whole, remains un-deciphered by viewers who are not accustomed to the calligraphic Nastaliq script or a minimal visual form. The script in this occasion stands as a symbol of an expression whose abstractness is ruled by a state of cognition and the image acts as an entrance to an unfamiliar realm. However, this lack of knowledge does not prevent a viewer from extracting a unique set of meaning from a ‘script as image’ descriptor, whereas a suggestive floor plan in the print allows one entry but with its mysterious cues to an imaginary and complex entirety of a figurative mapping.

These mappings unfold and at times mystify the images which are often parts or impressions of extended mnemonic forms, which were cast on paper or turned into sculptures over a period of five decades. By the Mango tree, an etching series from 1988, which show on the surface, forms of a flower with four petals, a bud, or maybe a blooming bud. As simple as they appear on the exterior, the title opens a repertoire of shared memories, which brings to mind the mango flower that comes to full bloom, surviving winter into spring. Thus, mango tree, which in fact is represented through a cyphered floral pattern, or an abbreviated arabesque, initiates a whole set of interpretative mentation for the viewer. The anonymities in nature and the complex structure in which they are embedded in memory take shape in this manner.

Certain words were closer to Zarina like; threshold, door, entrance, they impersonated home for her. The familiarity of these words in Urdu that she incorporated in her prints carried their cultural norms. According to Zarina, like chaukhat which translates to threshold, contained the prescript of waiting for permission to enter which extends beyond denotive boundaries. Abstraction in architecture and in scripts interpreted as eluding from realism often took a sub-textual theosophical bend in her explanations, she mentioned, “The words, the titles of my work, always come to me before the image. Language ties my work together. Urdu is home”.[iii]Here, the language was her solace, through which she could embrace missing pieces of an identity left behind. It served as a sign, which directed at a metaphorical destiny. These signs were also single units of ornamentation from a supposed lattice, an arch, or a geometric connotation, which trickled in as abstract forms into her pool of imagery as a route to attain perfect and universal harmony, as often traced in Islamic architectures.

“Zarina’s use of Urdu writing is one of the more striking and elusive features of her print practice. It has taken a various forms over the years but most often consists, of a single word placed alongside an image, …Urdu is strangely a homeless language. It is seemingly on the road to extinction in its country of origin, that is, India but in Pakistan as well, where it is the official language…, it is tainted with the stain of being alien since it could be called the mother tongue of only a small minority population of migrants from northern India who were displaced during the violence of the Partition of the country in 1947”[iv], writes Aamir R. Mufti. A language whose roots can largely be traced back to Indo-Persian lineage, establishes a spontaneous connection, with Zarina’s leitmotifs of homeward bound longings, home in her themes is more of an idea, than a physical space. Memories of numerous afternoons spent in the courtyard with her older sister Rani, emerges in etching prints from 1990s, with one of them titled Father’s House (1898-1994). It is a linear adaptation of an ichnography with Urdu words spread across the imagined plan resembling patterns o which pauses the viewing experience with untranslatability. This intermediate state of discernability and ambiguity determine several equivalences or deviations with cultures and beliefs and prompts one to accept the limitation in translation and to embrace the futility of efforts to decode such syntaxes. “Translation is a mode. To comprehend it as mode one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation; its translatability..”[v] as Walter Benjamin explains in his essay The Task of the Translator;one discovers a similar zone where the abstractness of Zarina‘s visual language brings us to confront questions. Should all readable or accessible knowledge units be translated? Are we looking for an ideal visual translator through her art? This is an age with information as a prime economic good, and human lives are controlled by its accessibility and legibility. A fabricated sense of safety is assured by familiarity in well-charted registers, by those who trade information, at the same time there is so much that will remain precariously unaccounted, those that will never get measured by familiar gauges for categorization. These scarce occasions of coming across undefined or unclassified entropy reminds of the abstractness and untranslatability that Zarina’s works encompass through a maze of script and image.

A Paper Trail

Stepping aside to adjust a contemplation on the many modernisms, which bypassed the narratives as of how (women) artists with origins in South Asia, who witnessed one of the greatest and most violent migration in history, came to terms with their artistic and experiential incertitude. What were the crossways, which made them ‘women artists’ from artists? On the other hand, what kind of cultural residue were they burdened with, to ground their artistic identities, sometimes in a foreign land, sometimes their homeland and often in perplexity when the boundaries of ‘home and world’ would blur for them.

At the age of 21, Zarina married Saad Hashmi in 1958, her life changed drastically hereupon with extensive travels across the globe and intermediate visits to India. They travelled to Bangkok where Zarina came across the golden temple peaks, usage of gold leaf surfaced much later in her works, though one can’t be too sure as to how a material resides in the intuitive realm of the artist. Yet a relation between the light that reflects back from a golden surface, and the light entrapped in every living or inanimate object, generates Zarina’s personal discourse on ‘illumination’ and ‘awareness’ in a work like Blinding Light. ‘I carve the block and then I bring the light in’, said Zarina as for her the act of creating an impression or imprint on a surface becomes a statement. Here, the physical act of carving is not confined to the material but holds a deeper implication of emancipating unsettled thoughts and positions,  which released them through artistic passages. Zarina’s life as a wife of a diplomat adhered her to protocols that shaped societal and cultural expectations from women, complied to live in and adapt different cultures in foreign lands perhaps induced alienation yet she loved the freedom that the travels offered, that of familiarizing her to the local ethos and people. Coming across Japanese prints in one of the gatherings, led her to explore the printmaking techniques of Thailand. Woodblock works of Shiko Munakata charmed her, with their organic expansion following the grains of the board. These explorations held emancipatory exits to negotiate with the binding intervallic dislocations and societal onuses or anxieties that throttle creative outbursts. She made her first woodcut, produced stone rubbings inspired by temple carvings and hand-made plant fibre papers in Bangkok, and later on relief prints during her stay in India in 1971.

Intermittently these travels brought her back to the homeland, this time it was New Delhi in the early 1960s. Zarina came to know about Stanley William Hayter and his studio Atelier17 in Paris. She went to see an exhibition of Krishna Reddy who worked with Hayter and fancied a chance to visit Paris, which happened in 1964, from Hayter she learned about the densities and characters of paper, and simultaneously, absorbed the Parisian cultural waves. Four years later, she returned to Delhi, a strained relationship on a personal level led her to engage full time in her barsati studio. The life of an artist, which she desired probably, a difficult one though with struggles, which embraced gathering material from the streets, inking them to explore newer techniques, carving on wood blocks and taking prints on handmade Khadi paper, with the graininess of paper opening up venues to dig into spatial depths.

The history of paper has transcended geopolitical boundaries and has gained acceptance as a universal medium for communication. Printing on paper with their techniques, longevity, and methods of proliferation are as diverse as the cultures from where they originate. Recollections of the materiality of paper imaginably transported Zarina to the memories of books she came across as a child in her family home at Aligarh. A significant duration of travel in her life resounded, ‘paper in relation to her journeys’ as a ‘transportable surface’[vi], one that is readily available and one that would stay with her. Methods of papermaking caught her interest, the uniqueness of technique from places she visited, found a way into her practice. What each type is capable of representing or supporting like in Wall 3, a paper cast gilded with 22-carat gold or Claw House, a paper cast from 1984. Zarina carved out open spaces at times to allow the work to breathe and to offer a visual pause. I Whispered to earth, another paper cast made in 1979, appears as a deep-set imprint of strong and dense mesh, one may trace a connection with her much adored poetries and pauses of Ghalib or Faiz.

This route, however, had melancholic interludes each time it winded back to her homecoming, with incidents like her family moving to Pakistan in 1959 and her childhood home becoming a foreign land. Zarina visited her sister Rani in Karachi years later. Her series of wood cut prints called Letters from home were the unsent letters from Rani, some imagined and some accounted hints from their lives. This repeated reference to a ‘home or house’ remains both an allegory and a subtext to indicate a strong desire for anchorage, as Zarina mentioned in a soulful expression ‘Perhaps it is easier to leave and say, I wish I’d stayed, than stay and wish you would left – I will never know’.[vii]