Language

Zarina described language—especially poetry—as one of exile’s greatest losses. Urdu connected her to the domestic and intellectual world of Aligarh, to family correspondence, to remembered speech, and to literary traditions that continued across borders. Listening, reciting, reading, and writing kept that world available even when everyday life took place largely in other languages.

The work does not turn Urdu into a decorative sign of identity. Its presence establishes a position: these images arise from a particular language and do not abandon that location for the convenience of every viewer. At the same time, line, rhythm, and material allow the work to address people who cannot read the script. Difference is sustained rather than erased.

Zarina often began with a word and made an image in response. In Home is a Foreign Place, terms such as threshold, courtyard, distance, and border carry histories of use that no literal illustration could exhaust. The carved form does not translate the word; it opens another route into its associations.

This is why the pairings can feel both exact and mysterious. A viewer may recognize the image but not the script, read the Urdu but interpret the form differently, or encounter both as abstraction. The gap between word and image remains productive. It makes reading an active negotiation among sound, memory, cultural knowledge, and visual experience.

Urdu Proverbs began in conversation between Zarina and her sister Kishwar “Rani” Chishti. Rani gathered and selected the sayings the sisters most loved and remembered from childhood and youth; Zarina answered them with woodcuts. The collaboration joins oral memory to printed form. Familiar phrases—comic, cautionary, sharp, or paradoxical—become a shared structure for looking.

The ten-print 1991 portfolio and the related book Urdu kay aik so aik mahavray (One Hundred and One Urdu Proverbs) are distinct but connected projects. Rani compiled the larger gathering of proverbs; Zarina illustrated and published it. In the 2011 re-strike, the Urdu moves beneath each image, changing the pacing and making the encounter between saying and form immediate on every sheet.

Zarina’s attachment to writing was shaped by Urdu poetry and by encounters with architectural inscriptions, Qur’anic text, and the geometry of Islamic buildings. She was attentive to the way writing could be scaled, repeated, embedded in a surface, or partially obscured. Legibility and visual structure were never simple opposites.

Letters could therefore become verticals, grids, intervals, or fields without losing their cultural resonance. An alif is both a line and a letter; a repeated text can approach pattern while retaining the possibility of reading. The work asks viewers to distinguish between not understanding a language and treating it as mere ornament. Opacity is part of the encounter, not a defect to be corrected.

Poetry offered Zarina a language in which journey, estrangement, mortality, and return could remain unresolved. Road Lines concludes with a couplet by Allama Iqbal; Santa Cruz turns to Faiz Ahmad Faiz. The poems are not captions that explain the prints. They carry histories of recitation and recognition, allowing a contemporary image to sound within an older literary field.

In later works the verse moves into the image itself. Lines from Faiz and Iqbal appear in Companions of the End of the Night and Beyond the Stars, where Urdu, black ink, and gold leaf share the same surface. Poetry becomes spatial: something crossed by the eye, held beneath a form, or encountered as radiance before it is fully read.

Zarina’s works often provide an English title while refusing a complete translation of the Urdu. That choice does not close the work. It establishes several positions from which it may be approached: through fluent reading, partial recognition, sound, visual analogy, or the awareness that another viewer knows what one does not.

Home is a Foreign Place makes this plurality structural. Thirty-six Urdu words and corresponding woodcuts unfold like a poem, each pairing carrying domestic and cultural associations larger than a dictionary definition. Translation becomes a relation between languages and viewers—not a replacement in which one language disappears into another.