Minimal, women, artists

In her studio apartment in New York in which she has lived for 40 years, Zarina Hashmi reduces the rites of memory and the conundrums of political disenchantment to a withering indictment in a few sharp lines. It has always been thus. At Armory, the popular art fair that ended on March 6, her works were on view at the Gallery Espace booth, their sparseness drawing attention amidst the babble and razzmatazz of the pop-and-weird. Born in India, with family in Pakistan, and a practice in America, she has drawn attention to the plight of the homeless and the displaced. "There is so much I am witness to," she says, pain moistening her eyes, this artist who has erased geographies and carried the burden of histories within her.

In another part of the same city, Nasreen Mohamedi - born in 1935, the same year as Hashmi - has ushered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new branch, called the Met Breuer. The press has been ecstatic about Mohamedi's retrospective, which it has hailed for its brilliance while castigating a parallel exhibition of unfinished works by well-known European artists. The retrospective was first shown at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, then at Museo Reina Sofia in Spain, before arriving in New York where its curator, Roobina Karode, introduced her works to a visibly moved audience.

Like Hashmi, Mohamedi reduced her visual language to the minimal, a few lines and grids of such lightness and eloquence, it feels like a song in pen and ink. Haunted by unrequited love, obsessive about cleanliness, Mohamedi succumbed to Huntington's disease, gradually losing control over her muscles, using the metier of lines to register her pain and loneliness as an artist and teacher in Baroda.

Hashmi and Mohamedi are in many ways atypical of Indian art which, whether modern or contemporary, is burdened by opulence rather than minimalism. That two women artists should choose to work with lines in the drafting tradition of architecture is itself axiomatic of a space usually reserved for men who have found in its rigid stance the ability to emote without sentiment. Acceptance for and of them in the Western world, however hard-won, has been easier than back home in India. Yet, those lines are not without feeling. Theirs might be an art without emotion but it is not without its ability to move us.

There is much that is common between the two artists beside their year of birth and their minimal vocabulary. Both came from emancipated Muslim families that were not without means, even though they were not wealthy; both inclined towards education and learning, and even now, Hashmi tends to her Urdu and Punjabi even though she was denied an Indian visa because of her travels to Pakistan. She worries where her works will end up after she is gone, and has made grants to museums and universities in her lifetime.

Hashmi's ordered and orderly life is as neatly contained in shelves and boxes as Mohamedi's drawings. She ventures out rarely, seeking the solitude in which Mohamedi found a refuge, but is not without hope. Where Mohamedi's lines seared with their sharpness, Hashmi's unfold and collapse under grief. Mohamedi died in 1990; Hashmi, bent by the weight of age, continues to be prolific, her constellation of collages taking up her time as she frets over the state of the world in which alienation isn't just another word but a lived experience. As the Western world celebrates these two women from the subcontinent, India's art history has made place for their courage and bravery - not just of their spirit but, especially, of their art.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated