A place called home: Remembering the life and art of the reclusive Zarina

Kishore Singh on the life and art of Zarina, the reclusive artist who died this week in New York aged 83

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Weekend Reads   |   India’s Partition

Kishore Singh 

Zarina Hashmi spent the better part of her life looking for a home to call her own — an act of political rebellion as well as social ostracisation — reflecting a migrant’s rootlessness, the inability to feel settled. Ironically, she had a surfeit of homes: the first, in Aligarh, a sprawling professor’s house with the tang of mangoes in the backyard but also the corralling of the native in a colonised land.

To be Muslim in post-Partition India was a cross her family found increasingly hard to bear, and migrated, in 1959, to Pakistan. One identity was erased, replaced ...

First Published: Fri, May 01 2020. 21:00 IST