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[[image]] Time, 1999, Woodcut, 8x6 inches [[image]] Despair, 1999, Woodcut, 8x6 inches tragedies and comedies of this lost world are left alone. On the foundations of this ghar, she raises the edifice of the haveli in the air, which is more real than it ever was. The mandala of memory may indeed be abstract and minimal, but the history of privacy and intimacy that it signifies is both discursive and opulent. The problem that Zarina has had to grapple with is to say much without saying anything, and in that she has succeeded brilliantly. A girl belonging to an ashraaf Muslim family which, despite being progressive, was bound to traditional values in the Aligarh mode, Zarina appears to have learnt well the virtues of silence. Coming from a culture that preferred subtle means over communication over verbal or gestural rhetoric, she possesses the ability to speak volumes without being loquacious. The balaghat or lucidity of Zarina's minimalism is clearly indebted to this tradition. To appreciate this is to get the best from the exhibits. Indeed, if Zarina's art is attributed entirely to the Western style, it loses everything. What she has contributed to the minimalist style in her low-tech medium is something which only an artist from the subcontinent could have done. It is with the idea of a haveli that Zarina has made inroads into minimalism and transformed it from within. Dubbing her as a minimalist in the Western tradition would mean that her challenge is of no significance. Those of a self-consciously progressive, liberal persuasion may have little patience with the artist's memories of a coercive past during which women were subject to many restrictions. But Zarina does not care for this kind of criticism for she is not eulogising [[eulogizing]] that world but remembering it with affection as a means of fortifying herself in New York, where the artist currently resides. Even an independent woman who has lived life on her own terms, the artist maintains, needs this. Her apartment in New York is now the memory of a haveli and the city's space its arz-o-sama or earth and heaven in Aligarh. So it is that the waxing and waning of the moon is a Ferris wheel, the aandhi or dust-storm a dance of atoms preceding the creation of the cosmos and darkness slashed with frenzied lines the terror or wehshat 132 The Herald, October 2000
