A place called home: Remembering the life and art of the reclusive Zarina

Kishore Singh on the life and art of Zarina, the reclusive artist who died this week in New York aged 83

Zarina Hashmi spent the better part of her life looking for a home to call her own — an act of political rebellion as well as social ostracisation — reflecting a migrant’s rootlessness, the inability to feel settled. Ironically, she had a surfeit of homes: the first, in Aligarh, a sprawling professor’s house with the tang of mangoes in the backyard but also the corralling of the native in a colonised land. To be Muslim in post-Partition India was a cross her family found increasingly hard to bear, and migrated, in 1959, to Pakistan. One identity was erased, replaced by