"Capturing a Time" by HG Masters

In 2011, Zarina Hashmi was one of four artists selected to represent India at the 54th Venice Biennale, in the country’s first national pavilion. When the curator, poet, and theorist Ranjit Hoskote wrote about his curatorial premise for the pavilion as a laboratory for studying the concept of the nation, he cited Sunil Khilnani’s passage from The Idea of India (1998): “ultimately, the viability—and most importantly, the point—of India’s democracy will rest on its capacity to sustain internal diversity.” At Venice, Zarina exhibited her suite of 36 abstracted woodblock prints, Home is a Foreign Place (1999), dedicated to memories of the place she was born, along with a hanging strand of gilded lightbulbs, Noor (2008), and Blinding Light (2010), a gold-leaf-covered sheet of paper. For Hoskote, Zarina’s art “emerges from the quest of a subjectivity profoundly shaped by the trauma of the 1947 Partition of British India. In a profound sense, it embodies India’s birth moment, when Independence and Partition occurred together, producing lifelong questions of identity and belonging for South Asian Muslims.”

Born in 1937, Zarina grew up in Aligarh, the daughter of a history professor at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Sheikh Abdur Rashid, whose family came from Punjab. As she recounted to Samir S. Patel in ArtAsiaPacific Issue 54 (Jul/Aug 2007): “Culturally, in Aligarh, we were Muslims, but we considered ourselves Indians.” She was ten years old when British India was partitioned on August 15, 1947, into the states of India and Pakistan, splitting the Punjab region in half. In a 2017 presentation at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, she recollected hearing mobs outside her house before she fled with her sister and mother in a truck to Delhi, where they stayed in a refugee camp run by an uncle. Though she saw roads strewn with dead bodies on the way, she counted her family fortunate compared to the millions who were displaced or killed in sectarian clashes. For Zarina, “the pain of Partition came much later,” as she witnessed the promise of a secular, pluralistic India collapse through recurring communal riots and pogroms against Muslims during her lifetime.

Read full article at artasiapacific.com