I recall meeting Zarina Hashmi and seeing her work on the same day at Chawkandi Art in Karachi in the mid-1990s. The kora of the unbleached cotton she wore seemed to have leached out of the handmade paper of her prints, as did the black handloom linear weaves that I was to learn later were a style staple with her.

The quietness of Hashmi’s work was intriguing; the woodcuts had a restrained energy, waiting to be released through the imagination of the viewer. I found my path through them with childhood recollections, as the Aligarh she spoke of in the art was my maternal home.

Hashmi was fiercely independent and private, she didn’t like to speak of her marriage that ended early and led her to become the first career woman in her family. Financial independence gave her the freedom to learn printmaking in Europe and Japan. When my colleagues and I were interviewing her for NuktaArt, she proudly shared her participation in the feminist art movement of New York. Hashmi remained professionally active in New York but unsung for a long time. However, in the last decade she was happy that her narrative had begun to resonate with the younger generation in the West.

In Karachi, where many had similar experiences of displacement, her narrative gained traction from her first solo in 1985 at Chawkandi Art and, over the years, she found many friends among critics and collectors. It was the special bond with her elder sister Rani that drew Hashmi to Karachi, even although she never could think of it as home. Her parents too did not fully get over the trauma of being uprooted. This is reflected in the ‘Home On Wheels’ she created for her mother and recalled the garden Rani had planted — a replica of their childhood one — in her prints.

While spending a long afternoon in her loft in New York, it struck me how spartan her space was, just like her woodcuts. Hashmi had journeyed far from the sprawl of scented gardens and monsoon-soaked, moss-covered architecture of Aligarh. In her later years, if she were to draw the plan of the open plan space, it would be a simple rectangle. And yet, Hashmi in her art liked to walk though complex floor plans and give them culturally coded titles in Urdu, holding on tightly to memories like a talisman on her hijrat across the world for half a century.

Published in Dawn, EOS, May 10th, 2020