Zarina Hashmi

Geeti Sen: Zarina, your work all along has been about journeys. About mapping locations, dislocations, borders, and destinations. These are journeys through both space and time. Your images have a conceptual quality. I suppose this has something to do with the nature of woodcuts and the graphic medium and your own sensibility. But because your images are abstract and minimal, because they inscribe memories through geometric lines, they awaken a series of emotions and associations. These memories belong not only to you-there is something universal about them.

Zarina Hashmi: As you know, I have done a portfolio of prints, called, The House with Four Walls. I lived in Aligarh with my siblings and my parents a long time back. Through my prints, I have revisted my childhood. The ground plans of the nine houses in which I have lived in different cities around the world, from Delhi to Tokyo to Berlin to Paris to Santa Cruz to New York, have also been explored. The last series in this set is The Home is a Foreign Place.

GS: Your work (shown in Delhi) in 2000 and about ten years ago at Santa Cruz was about mapping personal memories of this house in Aligarh. In San Francisco, you had put up an installation in bronze, titled, House on Wheels: there were hundreds of little homes on the move, trailing across an entire wall. But now, you have actually taken the leap from a personal journey into the realm of shared journeys-addressing the dilemma of people and cities across the world from Delhi to Sarajevo to Baghdad to New York. Your work now focuses on mapping the dislocation of peoples across the world. We had laughed about this at your exhibition-about the fact that my article on your earlier show had held out a prophecy-in suggesting that this might actually happen.

ZH: Yes, the article that you had written and which was used in the catalogue, had concluded on this note. For many years, I have worked on the theme of loss of home-the loss of country and language. In 2000, when I was in Delhi, I decided to go to Aligarh for a day-to visit this place about which I had created a whole narrative, which is only 81 miles away from Delhi but which is 3,438 miles away from New York! I went to see the house from which I have derived so much inspiration-The House with Four Walls. It was very strange-I felt very close and yet very distant. My parents were no longer there, my brothers were scattered all over the world. I didn't know how to connect with my own feelings- In a way, it was like closing a book shut. I am glad I went there because I knew it was over-although it was over a long time back. I find myself still scratching the surfaces of memories though. When I went back to New York, I decided to do a map of Delhi.

Zarina Hashmi. Delhi III. Woodcut.
Edition of 25. 2000.

GS: There are three layouts of Delhi. You have one of the Walled City, one, which looks to me like Lutyens' Delhi, and then another, which is just a wavy line.

ZH: I wanted an aerial map of Delhi-you might remember my passion for gliding. I thought, I would go up for a ride, and take a photograph, but that didn't happen. Because of security reasons, I could not get access to aerial maps. Then, in New York, when I started to work, using the Internet, I realized how easy it was to get maps of any place-you just had to click the name of the city! I had a choice: there were old maps, there were new maps, and there were also 19th century engraved maps. I used these as my starting points and did a map of Delhi. I called this series, Three Images of Delhi.

GS: One of these maps looks to me like Lutyens' Delhi, with the intersection of Janpath and Rajpath. another of the walled city of Shahjahanabad.

ZH: Yes, Lutyens' Delhi is from an old English engr-aving which features Chandni Chowk and Namboo-diri Ghat which is now Raj Ghat and a little bridge.

GS: And the third is the most enigmatic of all-just a line vanishing away, dissolving into the frame. Is this meant to be the winding course of the river Yamuna?

ZH: When your plane takes off and the city 'disappears', all you see is the coastline. I was thinking of other cities, of Karachi and Bombay, which are on the sea. So, this is not really a literal 'translation' of Delhi.

GS: You have another arresting frame, of the city dissolving into nothingness.

ZH: When I came to Delhi in 2000, there was so much pollution that you couldn't see the city. Old Mehrauli, especially, had just been wiped out-demolished by the new farm-houses. All you saw was rubble. I have travelled so much; I have seen cities through clouds. When you see cities through clouds, you see no borders, just an abstract pattern.

GS: In the last few years, you have moved beyond the city of Delhi-to chart out other cities of the world. Is this how you arrived at The Atlas of My World?

ZH: I thought it would be a good idea to look at all the borders I had crossed. I was thinking of not just borders on a map but also the barriers one crosses in life-where you come from, the risks you take in life in crossing over to do new things. I started with the border that has most affected my life-the border between India and Pakistan. I decided to make an atlas from existing maps and draw the borders that I have crossed from country to country...There is the American continent with Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Then, there's Europe, there's the Middle East from Turkey to Saudi Arabia, and there's Africa-the only country I have visited there is Morocco, so you find it on my map.

GS: Why have you inscribed the names of these places in Urdu?

ZH: Because this is the Atlas of my own world! I wrote the names of the countries I had visited in my mother tongue. There is the sub-continent with India and Pakistan. Bangladesh, I have visited only once, and I have put it with Burma, Malaysia, and Thailand on another map.

GS: So, this is still in some senses, your mapping of personal territory. Perhaps, the most exquisite of your works is The Horizon, which you title in Urdu as Ufuq (2001). This woodcut shows a serene, expanding space with no borders. Is this a metaphor for the change in your state of being?

ZH: I have explored in my works, in some way or the other, the theme of flight. I learnt to glide because it was my inner desire to fly. The first print I made in 1966 was an etching called Flight Log. I have always been fascinated by horizons. I have driven cross-country across America: it is so empty and you see the horizon and think you are almost there but you never reach it. Sufism is ano-ther major influence. In one of my father's books, I read the sura from the Quran, which is a favourite with the Sufis:

We shall show them Signs
On the Horizon and in their own Souls.
I checked the meaning of the Arabic word: 'Ulfaq' means 'horizon',
it also means 'foreign lands'.
I thought, it also referred to the truth you sought in your own soul.