Abstract
Zarina Hashmi was an Indian-born artist whose work was profoundly shaped by the 1947 Partition of India, which instilled a lifelong sense of exile and displacement. These experiences became the central themes of her minimalist art, which explored concepts of home, memory, borders, and belonging. Though she held a mathematics degree, Zarina trained internationally with printmaking experts. Working primarily with handmade paper, she created prints, collages, and sculptures defined by geometric austerity and deep emotional resonance. Urdu language and poetry were fundamental to her practice, often integrated into seminal works like Home is a Foreign Place (1999). While she exhibited for decades, significant international recognition arrived late in her career, highlighted by a 2012 retrospective and participation in India’s first Venice Biennale pavilion in 2011. She died in London after complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
Biography
Zarina Hashmi (née Rasheed) was born in the university town of Aligarh, in British-ruled India, in 1937. Her father, Sheikh Abdur Rasheed, was a history professor at Aligarh Muslim University and a keen gardener. Her mother, Fahmida Begum, had a garden in the women’s wing of their sprawling house. Hashmi spent an idyllic childhood with her siblings and grew up surrounded by books and poetry in an intellectually stimulating atmosphere. This home and garden would be central to her work, not only as built space but also as a receptacle of emotions, memory, security, sense of belonging, and identity. 1947 was a cataclysmic year: British rule ended, and India, Pakistan, and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) were formed amidst catastrophic violence drawn on religious lines. The Independence of British India resulted in the partition of the eastern and western frontiers, which displaced 15 to 20 million people, Hindus and Muslims. It killed about two million people, making this the bloodiest migration in human history. Hashmi witnessed violence and migration as a child and even as a refugee. She was first sent to Delhi with her siblings, and then they went to Lahore, Pakistan. She returned to India with her father, but everything had changed irrevocably — she would forever feel like she lived in exile, and her oeuvre consistently reflected this sentiment. In 1959, the rest of her family moved to Karachi, Pakistan, and she married Saad Hashmi, an Indian diplomat. The couple did not have children. Travel allowed her to learn art-making, and she had to juggle a flourishing artistic practice alongside the duties of a diplomat’s wife. They lived in Bangkok, New Delhi, Paris, and Bonn; on her own, she lived in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, and New York. Hashmi spent the last two years of her life in London.
Zarina had a bachelor’s degree in mathematics but did not attend art school; instead studied with traditional masters of printmaking. Her journey as an artist began in 1958; she learned woodblock printing in Bangkok. Zarina lived in New Delhi in the early 1960s and between 1968-74 and had close ties to Indian modernists like Tyeb Mehta, M.F. Husain, and V.S. Gaitonde. She also knew Nasreen Mohamedi, born in the same year as her, was a master of abstraction and minimalism. Zarina participated in workshops with artists like Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh and Bhupen Kakkar. She was an active member of the artist community in New Delhi, where she held her first solo show in 1968. Spending a few years in Paris from 1964 to 1967, she joined Atelier 17, an art school and studio, where she studied the intaglio technique with S.W. Hayter. She regularly met Indian artists living in Paris, like Krishna Reddy, S.H. Raza, and Akbar Padamsee. In Bonn, Germany, she learned silkscreen printing. She travelled to Tokyo under the aegis of the Japan Foundation Fellowship in 1974, an important point in her artistic training, and she extended her two-week stay to spend a year in Japan. Zarina was an apprentice at the Toshi Yoshida Studio and worked with Father Gaston Petit, a printmaker and Dominican priest from Canada. This was a remarkably busy time for her as she worked two jobs and experimented with printmaking. Japan significantly influenced her artistic practice with techniques and materials and helped develop her unique style. In 1975, Zarina moved to Los Angeles. She was politically aware and actively embraced the feminist cause, attended marches where she was often the only woman of colour, and fought to claim and create space for women in the arts. After Saad Hashmi died suddenly in 1977, Zarina chose to stay in the United States and made New York her home. The city remained her primary base for years, although in the 1990s, she went through a two-year legal battle to keep her studio. The threat of losing her home all over again was reflected in Home is a Foreign Place (1999), a portfolio of 36 woodblock prints that meditated on elements and signifiers of home. Hashmi was also a teacher— a skill she inherited from her father. She taught at the New York Feminist Art Institute, University of California, Santa Cruz in the 1990s and served as visiting faculty at several prestigious institutions, including Cornell University, Ithaca, USA.
Urdu was a fundamental element of Zarina’s work. She grew up speaking the language, reading, and memorising Urdu poems. In her works and interviews, she regularly quoted poets like Rumi (1207–1273), Mirza Ghalib (1797–1869), and Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984). Calligraphy in the Urdu script was a constant presence in her work. For example, the acclaimed Home is a Foreign Place (1999) began with a word and shared space with the image. She reflected on poetry, ideas of home, the experience of displacement, spirituality, and natural forms. Hashmi may have lived and worked abroad through most of her career. Still, she was aware and engaged with the politics of the Indian subcontinent, primarily on the grounds of religion, responding to the painful stories of loss and giving voice to the trauma of the Partition. She responded to the recent religious pogroms and refugee crises in Asia and Europe and created works like Rohingyas: Floating on the Dark Sea (2015) and Behind the Fence (2017). As she regularly travelled between countries in real life and dealt with monstrous bureaucracy, cartography and borders became visual metaphors, a device she revisited throughout her career, with significant artworks like Dividing Line (2001) and Abyss (2013). Zarina tied together themes of personal loss— of parents, homes, her language— with the epistolary art, finding anchors of belonging amid profound loneliness and isolation. Her sister’s letters were the basis of one of her most famous series, Letters from Home (2004).
Hashmi used colour thoughtfully, often letting the natural hues of the base contrast with the dark ink. In the 1970s, she worked with white ink and thread, making faint impressions on paper. A deliberate austerity often marked Zarina’s choice of materials, but she also used expensive materials like gold leaf to significant effect. She worked chiefly with handmade paper from India, Japan, and Nepal (among other places), engaging with its palpability and remaining keenly aware of the material’s historical importance and resilience. Although known best for her prints, she also made collages and sculptures. Even here, paper was central to her practice: she carved, cut, created collages, embossed (with various objects), etched, and folded them. She cut paper to create Shadow House (2006) and made multiple collages over the years, including Ten Thousand Things between 2011 and 2014, continuing to work with paper collages, even as late as 2018. While she moved between media, her preoccupation and examination of identity, a space of belonging, home, security, and movement persisted. In addition to paper, which she often “cast” to make sculptures, she also worked with aluminium, bronze, cloth, steel, terracotta, tin, wire, and wood, frequently reusing and recycling materials. Sculptures like House on Wheels (1981), I went on a Journey (1991) respond to architectural forms and speak of her peripatetic life and migration in a broader context. She explored spirituality, especially Sufi thought, and materiality through a sculpture of large prayer beads called Tasbih (2001) and Noor (Divine Light) (2008). When she took flying lessons in New Delhi, she observed the Safdarjung monument, an 18th-century funerary garden, from her glider, moving slowly and at a low height (unlike in a plane), noticing plans and discerning maps of the area. The sculpture Flight Log (1987), was inspired by the log she was required to keep to qualify for her flying license. This “aerial” perspective is a strong motif throughout her work, especially with maps and floor plans of houses. Restrained in form, her sculptures and prints were fraught with cultural and political significance: Zarina’s work was minimalist and universal, even as it was location- and culture-specific.
Zarina began to show her work in the 1960s, winning the (Indian) President’s Award for Printmaking in 1967. While she had exhibited internationally since the 1970s, global recognition and fame came to her in the early 21st century. She was among the four artists or artist groups invited to participate in India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011. Paper Like Skin, her first retrospective, was mounted at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2012 and travelled to the Guggenheim, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago the following year. In 2020, just as the pandemic brought the world to a grinding halt, Hashmi had two major shows:Zarina, A Life in Nine Lines, at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India, and a retrospective, Zarina: Atlas of Her World, at the Pulitzer Art Foundation, in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. In 2021, three significant works by Zarina were exhibited in Mapping the Lost Spectrum at Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, as part of a tripartite show celebrating 50 years of the Cymroza Art Gallery. She had shown in Bombay with Pundole in 1970 and Cymroza in 1986. She had also long-established associations with Chawkandi Art in Karachi, Gallery Espace in New Delhi, Gallerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger in Paris, and Luhring Augustine in New York. Her works are in significant collections like the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), CSMVS (Mumbai), Guggenheim (New York), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), among others.
While India, Pakistan, the United States, and all the cities she lived in could claim Zarina as their own, she belonged to art— it was her identity beyond nationality and religion. In her own words, she said her home was Urdu. She resisted any limiting classification of her art and, indeed, of herself. Succumbing to complications arising from Alzheimer’s disease, Zarina Hashmi died on 25 April 2020, in London, surrounded by her family.
