Bangkok was Zarina’s first home after Aligarh. She learned to navigate it by drawing maps, speaking Thai, and following an encounter with a woodblock print into printmaking.
Bangkok 1958–1961 · from Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines, 1997
A first posting
Looking beyond diplomatic life
A week after marrying Saad Hashmi in 1958, Zarina travelled with him by ship from Calcutta, stopping in Rangoon and Singapore before reaching Bangkok. Her first sight of the city was its temple spires in sunlight. Gold returned to her work decades later.
The formal expectations of a diplomat’s wife did not interest her. She went to the British Council to read about Thailand, copied maps from books for journeys to Angkor Wat and Phnom Penh, and learned colloquial Thai through conversations at home and in the markets. She became an informal interpreter at the Indian embassy.
Printmaking
The medium that stayed
At a diplomatic gathering she noticed a Japanese woodblock print and asked how it had been made. She began studying woodcut with a Thai artist teaching at Silpakorn University. Carving felt natural to her, even though she did not consider herself a draughtsperson.
When the Thailand posting ended, she and Saad returned to India. Printmaking, which she first pursued in Bangkok, remained central to her work.
A portable material language
Paper, imprint, and remembered gold
Bangkok introduced more than a technique. Zarina made her first woodcut there and took rubbings from temple carvings on handmade plant-fiber paper. Both processes depend on contact: pressure transfers the grain of a block or the relief of a carved surface onto a sheet. The image arrives as a physical trace rather than as an illusion drawn from a distance.
That lesson travelled with her. Handmade paper became a portable ground that could absorb the histories of later cities, while the gold she remembered on Bangkok’s temple spires returned as leaf, thread, and points of light. In Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines, Bangkok is named “First Home”: the beginning of married travel and of the process through which place entered her art.
“Something about printmaking excited me. It has been my most consistent medium. I don’t draw, but carving comes naturally to me—I still carve my own blocks.”
Zarina
archive
Bangkok and journeys nearby
Photographs of travel by ship, Zarina and Saad at Angkor Wat, and temple architecture evoke the journeys and visual impressions of the Bangkok years.
Zarina on board ship · Bangkok years · archiveZarina and Saad · Angkor Wat, 1959–60 · archiveTemple architecture · Bangkok years · archive
