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[[image: photograph of Zarina Hashmi]]  
ART

[[Underlined]] ZARINA HASHMI
IN LOVE WITH PAPER

To the list of ranking Indian artists whose work is acknowledged with acclaim abroad can be added the name of Zarina Hashmi. Not only because of the consistency with which she has committed herself to a life-time of creative work, but also because of the new art form she has developed with paper as the medium. What she is able to do with the paper today is a natural outcome of years of application starting with her work on woodcuts in Bangkok, in 1958. It seemed only logical she should, after Bangkok, spend 4 years at Stanley Hayter's Atelier 17, in Paris, where also began her enduring friendship with the celebrated printmaker and teacher, Krishna Reddy. After a spell at St. Martin's School of Art in London, she returned to India in 1968, to start her own printmaking workshop in New Dehli.

During the 3 years she stayed in India she traveled across the country visiting, often discovering, traditional papermaking techniques. She tells of her discovery in Sanganer, a small village on the outskirts of Jaipur. "Sanganer is a textile village and paper is made there from waste cotton. Papermaking has gone through very little change: being hidden away in a village the age of technology has passed it by. They place the vate there ina dug-out in the ground and the vatmen sit next to it. The mould is made of wood and has a flexible screen made of reeds. The reed screen is woven with horse hair. Paper is couched on jute sacs. When the water is squeezed out, the papers are laid against the mud walls of the houses to dry, the dried paper being then sized with startch paste. The sizing is done by the women in the family.When the sizing is dry the paper is pressed and the edges are trimmed. Traditionally the deckle edge is always cut. Sometimes paper is burnished with stone." 

Enriched by the unusual experience of seeing for herself these timeless craft traditions, she would draw upon them in her later work. After India, and three years 

DESIGN/January-March 1982 47