GS: There are affinities here, in exploring unconventional mediums. The images of Eva Hesse introduce also the fusion of fragility and strength. Her innovations took her far beyond her contemporaries: she used fiberglass and plastic, cord and wire and metal tubing. She made her choices in aesthetics, and before she died she had introduced a radical new approach to sculpture. There is her statement, much quoted but worth recalling:

     I have learned that anything is possible. I know that
     vision or concept will come through total risk,
     freedom, discipline.
     I will do it. 

I know you believe in discipline – your work is meticulous, attempting perfection in the finest details; and your ongoing commitment shows this. But do you also believe Zarina, in freedom – in taking risks?

ZH:  I won’t be here if I did not take risks. Making a mark on a surface is a risk. In 1983, I made a book of cast paper with text, Flight Log.  Each of the four pages had line of text on the overlaying page.  I was writing about my life, using the metaphor of flying and the physical experience of learning to fly the glider.  It also says everything that I had to say about my life at that time. This was my first work in book form. I wrote:
                      
                        I tried to fly
                        Got caught in the thermal
                        Could never go back
                        Having lost the place to land.

That first line says everything: that I tried to fly.  At least, I tried.

GS:  I remember that we had looked at it when I visited you in Santa Cruz, in 1996. I marveled at its ingenuity, its economy of words where four lines and four images could say everything one has to say about life. Each page is like a haiku in its brevity. The last written line corresponds to an empty page with no image: ‘Having lost the place to land’. 

These words, which seem so literal, speak of more than flying – of taking risks in life. The past tense is not past: it implies you tried, you are trying – as in flying – to break the barriers of time and space.    

ZH: I took lessons in flying gliders in New Delhi in 1973, just before I went to Japan. Gliders can only stay in the air for twenty minutes – this limitation is the exciting part of this experience. There is a chain, which connects the glider to the jeep, and at a certain point you must release this chain – it is like cutting off the umbilical cord, breaking connections. In 1974 I went to live in Japan on a Japan Foundation Fellowship. I lived in Tokyo for eight months, traveled extensively in the country, and from Japan I came to the United States.  

GS: Flight Log encapsulates in four pages your aspirations, your need for adventure: your eternal peregrinations that moved you across the world. When you married Saad Hashmi in 1958, his diplomatic career took you across to Bangkok, to Paris, to Bonn, to New York. In 1974 you traveled on your own to Tokyo; you went across continents visiting Lebanon and Iraq and Turkey; you visited Krishna Reddy and Judy in Paris; and in 1975-1976 you drove cross country from New York to Los Angeles, three times. You compelled yourself to cross your own limits – to cross borders – as you have recorded in your prints.

You made a portfolio marking these destinations in Homes I Made/A Life in Nine Lines, 1997. And later when you could not travel, you used the internet to trace the countries you had visited, titling them The Atlas of My World, 2001. In these you have inscribed the names in Urdu of the countries you had visited—this became then your personal atlas.  

What interests me is that despite this great wanderlust, you have been tied – rooted – to the idea of the home, the house.  I see these as two polarities of your self and your life – when you have moved from mapping the house to mapping the world; from the personal to the universal.   And I am amazed as to how this evolution has come about.        

ZH:  It did not happen in one day; I work instinctively, one theme lead to another. It is a logical development, but it is not a premeditated journey. Here again personal and political collided.  How can one ignore what is happening in the world: the injustices the violence perpetuated on innocent civilians, the wars fought over fraudulent claims. I can not join the resistance, I protest through my work. I drew the maps of cities destroyed, violated. Some of the cities I had visited, others needed to be memorialized.

Home is the center of my universe; I make a home wherever I am. My home is my hiding place, a house with four walls, sometimes with four wheels.

GS: In my experience I cannot think of anyone else, from India, as deeply committed to paper in its richness and texture and flexibility. Nasreen Mohammedi was one exception. You met her in New Delhi in the late 60’s and became close friends. Where did your concern begin with exploring paper?

ZH: In the house at Aligarh I grew up surrounded by books. My father was professor of history at the AMU, we had a large collection of books at home. Even before I learned to read I loved to look at the printed words and images. This is what drew me to printmaking and the book. I see prints as part of the Book. In the Western tradition, prints were part of the book.

GS: The print does not form part of the Indian tradition though, or of Indian sensibility. It enters art production in India in the 19th century, and more in the way of popular expression. But we could say that the ‘art of the book’ was patronized and practiced at the Mughal court and with Sultanate rulers from the 15th century, if not earlier. This was a complete exercise in the royal karkhanas: from the making of paper to the calligrapher and painter to the illuminator and the bookbinder. Might this, the idea of the bound book or album, the muraqqa, have influenced you?

ZH: One is influenced by so many things, words, images sounds and smells. For me prints are part of the book, I see no need for prints to compete with painting on canvas. These are two different means of expression two different sensibilities. 

I like working on series: the images become part of a narrative, a sequence. From 1990 to 2004, I have made fourteen portfolios. In some ways these portfolios are like albums or books, my autobiography. The House at Aligarh was the first book I made.

Then there is calligraphy: for me calligraphy is a higher form of expression then representation.  As in books and in albums, I too have inscribed words in Urdu – words which are related to the image. At times I add lines of a poem from Ghalib, Bahadur Shah Zafar, or Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Sometime I put down my random thoughts or record time of the day. The words are in my own language, recalling a time, a sensibility of thought and feeling. For me, words form an indispensable part of my visual expression.

GS: Yes, these words create the ethos with which we relate to the abstract image, to reach its meaning.  But there is a difference here from the printed book: your images are not illustrative of the word. They are finite, but since they define geometrical forms they do not belong to cognitive reality – they are abstractions.   

ZH: My work is not about the medium – it is about a concept. I begin work with a word, not the image.

In Home is a Foreign Place, 1999, I made a list of words, which were meaningful for me; and I took this list of words with me to Pakistan where a calligrapher wrote them in nastaliq script. Back in New York I developed idea-images, which flowed from these words. This is a portfolio of thirty-six small prints, each in a series of six. I placed words in a sequence. In these prints I have used the forms I have worked with over the years, in a way my sign language of the line, vertical and horizontal, the diagonal, the triangle, the circle and the square. All deal with basic geometry. I regard geometry as sacred practice.

The Gallery Espace show of Home is a Foreign Place, in the year 2000 was my first show in India after an absence of 15 years.