“I have used gold leaf off and on in my practice. I used it sparingly. I thought a screen of this size in gold might be garish; I put it off until it became necessary to express.”
— Zarina Hashmi, 20101
Outside of my parents, Zarina was the only person I spoke to in Urdu. For six years, as her studio manager, I took the train down to Zarina’s loft on West 29th Street, shedding English as I crossed her threshold. This linguistic shift, coupled with our 50-year age difference, invoked other culturally specific filial-matriarchal behaviours from both of us: I greeted Zarina with a sing-song Assalamualaikum, always served the tea, and would theatrically offer my seat to any elder standing nearby. Zarina made soup for lunch the week I had dental surgery, doled out Eidi bi-annually, and would often oh-so-diplomatically ask if I’d like to borrow a hairbrush, lipstick or shawl before we left for an opening. Alone, we conversed almost exclusively in Urdu. When the rest of the studio team arrived, we would slip English back on–reserving our first language for off-colour jokes (mostly Zarina), hastily whispered clarifications (me) or the occasional sharp reprimand (only Zarina).
Urdu has always felt like a mother tongue that encourages cosmopolitanism. As a native speaker I can converse in Hindi but not read or write it. I can read and write Arabic and Persian but will, at best, only understand a word or two in a sentence. It’s a linguistic beginning that gifts both a familiarity and an awareness of distance; it endears curiosity and a tolerance for linguistic limbo, of almost understanding. Zarina was a true cosmopolitan artist and voraciously collected languages. Born in the small university town of Aligarh, she left India in her early twenties, moving, initially with her diplomat husband to Bangkok, New Delhi, Paris and Bonn and then independently to Tokyo, Santa Cruz and finally New York2. She quickly became conversant in all the local tongues, and excelled especially in French (L’Etranger, she insisted, had to be read in French).
Zarina’s growing wardrobe of languages only deepened her reverence of her linguistic skin. Gestures to the cultural zeitgeist of each city she called home abound in Zarina’s art, yet Urdu is an iridescent thread that, once visible, can be traced through the end. Urdu Proverbs (2011), a hidden gem of a portfolio within her oeuvre, illuminates how Zarina’s use of Urdu evolved over time and, through it, her articulation of identity.
Zarina used Urdu, like she used gold leaf; sparingly — initially. She began with simple Urdu words as titles: Ghar (1984), Agni (1984), and Phool (Flower) (1989). These titles exist within a crowded constellation of equally poetic English monikers and can be read simultaneously as a tentative testing of the waters and a bold planting of flags. They are rare moments of non-translation/non-compliance by an artist straddling multiple worlds, reminding both herself and her audience of her other tongue. Zarina maintained this nomenclature for later sculptures like Noor (Divine Light) (2008) and Tasbih (multiple made from 2001–18).
The first iteration of Urdu Proverbs, titled Ten woodcuts by Zarina: based on Urdu proverbs, was published by the Women’s Studio Workshop (WSW) (New York) where Zarina was a resident in 1991. Each of the ten prints contains a simple, minimalist image, printed in black on a rectangular sheet of off-white handmade Nepalese paper. Both the woodgrain of the matrix and the fibers of the paper are visible. The Nepalese paper is mounted onto a larger sheet of machine-made beige paper. The last page of the portfolio features 10 phrases in Urdu, listed without translation — the proverbs that inspired each image.
“Words inspired me, images came later”3 is a common refrain in Zarina’s interviews. Through that final page of proverbs, Zarina is not just citing her literary inspiration but, in her use of Urdu script and the word Urdu in the title of the work, she is geotagging it. The proverbs themselves are very Zarina, in that they are sly, wickedly funny, and imbued with a geographic specificity that belies translation. The first, for example, states: After eating 900 mice the cat went for Hajj.4 It will delight those with an inner knowledge of the Urdu language and culture. (Yet…the proverbs are not entirely of my generation — I called my parents to help me untangle the literal translation from the essence of the phrase.) In spotlighting these phrases, Zarina is both documenting and memorializing. In her own words: “I was placing my work in a historical moment, capturing a time when one wrote and read in Urdu.”5 Her 1996 portfolios Road Lines and Santa Cruz included similar concluding pages that contained couplets by revered Urdu poets Allama Iqbal and Faiz Ahmad Faiz respectively.
Zarina used her proverb images as the illustrations for Urdu kay aik so aik mahavray (101 Urdu Proverbs, 1991) a book of Urdu proverbs compiled by her beloved elder sister, Rani.6 Rani’s dedication captures the project’s familial and linguistic urgency: “For my grandchildren, so their connection to the Urdu language is maintained.”7 Zarina was both illustrator and publisher of this family artist book. She had a small stack in her studio and would bestow them, judiciously, as gifts. My copy is the one she gifted to my parents in 2010.
Urdu script appears in Zarina’s image three years after Ten woodcuts by Zarina…(1991). In the sparse etching Father’s House (1994) Zarina draws the floorplan of her childhood home, labelling each room in Urdu — without translation. Similarly, in the final print of the portfolio Homes I Made/A Life in Nine Lines (1997) she labels the cardinal points of her compass in Urdu. Much like an Urdu speaker reading Arabic, these labels tease the uninitiated: you can sense their meaning but not truly read them. Zarina’s labelling protocol evolved as she undertook her most iconic bodies of work: the emotional index Home is a Foreign Place (1999), and the cartographic Atlas of My World (2001), and These Cities Blotted into the Wilderness (Adrienne Rich after Ghalib)8 (2003). The majority of her New York audience will not be able to read the Urdu words in these works, and yet through Zarina’s maps and universal pictorial lexicon we almost know. Zarina dispels the suspense by inscribing an English title softly in pencil underneath each image. The Urdu text is not necessary for comprehension, yet its presence insists that there are other ways of knowing, of naming — that there are other conversations.
Rani continued to be a linguistic muse for her younger sister beyond Urdu Proverbs. In Letters from Home (2004) Rani’s handwriting glows across the image plane of each of the eight prints in the portfolio — undulating from background to foreground, subject to decorative motif, from almost legible to obfuscated. Zarina does not translate any of the text. This is a private conversation. Zarina is reveling in the intimacy of a handwriting she knows as well as her own, of a conversation and relationship that existed only in Urdu. A list of cities, written in Urdu, unfurls in the background of Travels with Rani (2008) and Wrapping the Travels (2009), diaristic tracings of journeys the sisters shared, while Rani’s handwriting flashes again in the intimate collage Echo (2013).
In 2011 Zarina undertook a complete re-strike of the original Urdu Proverbs blocks. The images and layout of each print is largely the same, the black ink is richer, very little if any of the grain of the woodblock appears, and the larger machine-made paper is bigger. The notable difference however is the Urdu: the proverbs are no longer relegated to a final sheet but instead pasted directly below each image — without translation.
Making Urdu a part of the image without translation or clear visual cues as to what it might be saying was a subtle political repositioning by Zarina at a significant moment in her career. In 2011 she was representing India at the Venice Biennale and preparing for the American tour of her critically lauded retrospective Zarina: Paper Like Skin.9 On the cusp of a widening audience, Zarina invited the curious to enter her Urdu worlds.
This linguistic boldness was expressed through Urdu poetry. Zarina built upon her winking references to Urdu poetry in titles and citations on concluding pages by emblazoning poetry within her images. In Dilli (2010) she pastes Meer Taqi Meer’s poem in the centre of her collage, in Companions of the End of the Night (2013) and Beyond the Stars (2014) she pastes lines from Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Allama Iqbal respectively, underneath her image — like Urdu Proverbs there is no English translation on the artwork. The English titles gesture to translations but native Urdu speakers will recognize the English monikers for what they are — a few descriptive words. They do not capture the resonance and significance of the poetry the artist has embedded in her work — Zarina has flipped the hierarchies of understanding.
Urdu Proverbs, in its three iterations, serves as a prescient touchstone — foretelling shifts in Zarina’s practice; of Urdu growing from glinting titles, to quiet encrypted citations, emotional and cartographic labels, familiar decorative motifs, and finally glowing as unadulterated language. Poetic language that inspired Zarina’s meditations on the eternal questions of mortality and spirituality — telegraphing an artistic culmination: Zarina had reached a point where it was necessary to express herself in Urdu. To not translate herself, to create some works that were just for her, to cocoon herself in the language of communication and collaboration with her beloved sister, to weave and fully inhabit an Urdu world. To exclusively wear shalwar kameez or saris to openings, to reserve Fridays for jumma prayers, to religiously observe tea time, to sprinkle ittar, to evoke Faiz and Ghalib in as many conversations as possible, to exchange Khuda Hafiz as we parted.
Notes
1. From the essay A Sacred Geometry of Light and Dark: The Radiant Transits of Zarina Hashmi by S. Kalidas in the exhibition catalogue Zarina Hashmi: Recent Work, published by Gallery Espace, 2011.
2. Zarina moved to London in 2018 and was living there, under the care of her niece, when she passed in 2020 due to complications of Alzheimer’s.
3. From the essay Conversation with My Self by Zarina Hashmi in the exhibition catalogue Zarina Hashmi: Recent Work, published by Gallery Espace, 2011.
4. A pilgrimage to Mecca that is one of the five pillars of Islam and mandatory for all Muslims that are able once in their lifetime. Hajj, when performed with sincere repentance, absolves past sins against God.
5. From the essay Conversation with My Self by Zarina Hashmi in the exhibition catalogue Zarina Hashmi: Recent Work, published by Gallery Espace, 2011.
6. Kishwar Chishti. Rani is the family nickname for Kishwar and referenced frequently by Zarina in the works inspired by her sister.
7. Translation by author (Sarah Burney)
8. This artwork title cites two poetic references: the American poet Adrienne Rich and the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib who Rich herself paid homage to in her poetry.
9. Curated by Allegra Pesenti, which opened at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012), and travelled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and The Art Institute of Chicago.
About Sarah Burney
Sarah Burney is an independent curator and writer based in New York. Raised in Kuwait and Pakistan, Burney is a specialist of contemporary printmaking and contemporary art from South Asia and the Middle East. She is interested in exploring artists’ materials and processes and diversifying discussions in contemporary art. Burney’s professional experience spans a range of spaces in the field — from her role as Zarina’s studio manager, to the community printmaking studio Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPMW), to feminist art collectives South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) and the Guerrilla Girls.
