“I often wonder what my life would have been like had I never left my house of four walls in India. I will never know the privilege of living out my days in the country in which I was born, speaking in my mother tongue. There is truth to the phrase, ‘You can never go home again.’ I do not feel at home anywhere, but the idea of home follows me wherever I go.” These are the words of Zarina Hashmi, who is known professionally as Zarina. She was an artist whose works have primarily been based on the partition of India in 1947 and covered themes like displacement, dislocation and dispossession. According to her, the idea of home was an abstract concept rather than a physical or tangible one. The impact that the displacement from her home caused on her has been a recurring theme in all of her artwork.

Zarina Hashmi was born in India at Aligarh on 16 July 1937, when communal tensions in India were gradually escalating. She grew up in a secular Muslim household, which her family would eventually leave behind and migrate to Pakistan post-1947. Zarina’s father was a professor of history at the esteemed Aligarh Muslim University. In 1947, her family had to move to a refugee camp in Delhi. They would eventually move to Lahore and later Karachi, but Zarina remained in India to pursue her studies at Aligarh. She did her graduation in mathematics. Her interest in the same and architecture is portrayed in her use of geometry and the accuracy of structures in all her works. And her poignant minimalism is what makes her career exemplary. While growing up, it was the magnificent yet subtle architecture of Fatehpur Sikri that inspired her to learn about minimalism. The architecture of mediaeval India served as the root for her passion and love for drawing straight lines.

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In modern scholarship, Zarina’s art has been interpreted in the light of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism to a greater extent. However, it can be argued that the core of her art has always been about the life-changing event of displacement for millions in India, which we so casually term the ‘Partition’.

While studying at Aligarh Muslim University, Zarina met Indian diplomat Saad Hashmi, whom she eventually married. In her early years of marriage, she travelled widely and was introduced to woodblock printing in Bangkok. Most of her works are woodcuts or etchings printed on handmade paper. Since she was a mathematician-turned-artist, the geometric precision in her artwork is clearly apparent. Besides architectural plans for houses, her work also involved cartography. She had a deep interest in geography as well as in how cities were built. Words, too, were a strong language that she implemented in her moving art.

Among all her many astounding works, her ‘Dividing Line’ (2001) stands out because of its minimal yet formidable nature, myriad interpretations and some specific connotations. At first glance, it appears as a mere black line inscribed on a piece of paper. However, by observing carefully, one will eventually notice that it is the tension-fraught border of India and Pakistan, or rather the ‘Radcliffe Line’, the introduction of which changed the trajectory of her life and millions of others entirely. Zarina’s ‘Home is a Foreign Place’ (1999) reflects upon her faraway childhood home, as she has been quoted saying, “This piece is my narrative of the house I was born in and left in my early twenties, never to return.” Each print includes an Urdu word synonymous with what ‘home’ means in English, written in calligraphy. It encourages the viewer to interpret it with their sense of the word “home’s” meaning, thus transcending the barriers of language.

Her ‘Letters From Home’ (2004) is a portfolio of eight monochromatic woodblock and metal-cut prints that were made by using original Urdu letters that her sister Rani had written to her. Zarina and her sister were inseparable, traversing life’s adversities together and sharing an unbreakable bond. Zarina says, “Many people have asked why I titled this portfolio Letters From Home when I have never lived in Pakistan. For me, home is not a place. It is wherever the people you care about the most are waiting.” Time and emotions seem frozen in the woodblocks of this series.

Some of her works depict aerial views of cities. The series ‘Cities I Called Home’ (2010) contains woodcut aerial maps of the many cities that she lived in throughout her life. The series Delhi (2000) consists of three maps of the city, with the third one also outlining the River Yamuna, the water body that brings life to the landlocked city of Delhi.

Her passion for cartography is best evident in her series ‘Atlas of My World’ (2001). Being a refugee of the largest mass migration in human history, losing her home and living in several cities thereafter but yearning for the childhood abode that she lost, this series depicts the greater world that we are part of, highlighting regional and political boundaries. In the fourth picture of this series, there is an extension of the Radcliffe Line. Aparna Megan Kumar interprets it as an umbilical cord connecting the two nascent nations with the external world. Analysing this, we see how it was the external party that infused the seeds of communalism among the Indian people to channelise the birth of the two new countries, which gradually became three.

As mentioned before, Zarina possessed a love for language. And she often inculcated the love she had for words into her art. Her sculpture, named ‘Flight Log’ (1987), consists of a small stanza of four lines written by her. It goes as follows:

“I tried to fly

Got caught in the thermal

Could never go back

Having lost the place to land”

She has later said, “In those four lines, I wrote my autobiography.”

Zarina’s work has also echoed the suffering and agony of refugees across the world. It is often said that it is pain that brings people closer to one another. And perhaps Zarina’s own experience of displacement from her childhood home made her feel connected to refugees around the globe. Her work, ‘Refugee Camp’ (2015), was contemporary to the humanitarian crisis in Syria. Zarina has been regarded as one of the rare artists to reach out to points of crisis everywhere by Hoskote. Besides the Syrian crisis, the plight of the Rohingyas and the crises in Baghdad and Lebanon had moved her deeply.

The concept of home is a lingering factor that recurs throughout Zarina’s career. In an interview at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Zarina said, “I carry the idea of home with me, but I have trouble calling any place my home.” She continues, “I doubt anyone who is permanently dislocated ever feels truly at home.”

Zarina’s artworks are a testament to the fact that memory and longing influence the very core of our existence. Her art has also become an aid to scholars whose main field is partition historiography. Home and memory become synonymous while interpreting her artworks, eventually leading to a feeling of longing that we can relate to about something or someone we have lost forever.