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of the night. Zarina uses cryptic Urdu titles, all of them mnemonic signs of the artist's home and culture, to evoke the past.

It is misleading to think of Paul Klee and his way with the line in Zarina's context. Though European art historians would feign ignorance about the fact, Klee's bon mot about the line taking a walk may well have been derived from the arabesque. In this form, the line dances forever between the finite and infinite, the contingent and the transcendent. Zarina's line may not have come from this source as she says that she found it in a Maya artifact. But, as the thread, it signifies a typically feminine craft of home and haveli, squarely within the parameters of her culture.

In Urdu, the idiom bakhia udherna literally means the picking of stitches. Similarly, Zarina unstitches the fabric of her mind to unravel her memories. The thread as a motif is intrinsic to Persian and Urdu poetry. While Shah Hussain is said to have spun cotton his charkha or spinning wheel in the throes of love, Majnoon, Farhad and their prototypes tore their shirts to threads in frenzied passion. Lovers who oscillated between madness and sanity were clever rafugars of torn shirts and lacerated bodies. 

Even the technique of collage, the mode of modern manic art, was preceded by the patched mantle of the spiritually lucid Sufis. Mir Anees described the creation of night and day as paivand kari: "Fikre rafu thi charkhe hunar mand ke liye / Din char tukre ho gaya paivand ke liye". Similarly, Zarina's prints of thread-works eulogise a low-tech indigenous craft. Her watan or home is a patchwork quilt made in a manner similar to the Sindhi rilli. Zarina has gone low-tech to depict how a single, independent woman is nostalgic for her home and her origin, even in the context of feminist art and its rhetoric. Art of this ind has not been seen here for a long time.

[[image]]
Hot Breeze, 1999, Woodcut, 8x6 inches

Photos courtesy Chawkandi Art

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 of 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.


The Herald, October 2000

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