Zarina and the Zenana
Zarina and the Zenana
by Sadia Shirazi
I.
Vines and lizards clamber over the white washed walls of a courtyard home in the city of Aligarh. In Pre-Partition India, Shibli road was once lined with brick houses constructed for the faculty of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College, which was founded in 1875 by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. Khan was a philosopher and educational reformer who set his sights in the late nineteenth century on what David Lelyveld describes as an “autonomous system of education for the Muslims of India.” The college was the first center of Islamic modernist learning in the Indian subcontinent for which Khan had envisioned combining an education model of learning from the knowledge of the madrasah, derived from different parts of the Islamic world, with curricula drawn from Oxford and Cambridge.
Up till then, if they wished to retain a connection to their traditions, Muslims in India were largely confined to receiving an education from Islamic madrassas. If they wanted to join the British civil service they were forced to choose Christian, secular institutions. Khan offered a reformed Islamic education though it was more ambitious than that. The school was to include Muslims of various sects and non-Muslims, and collective rituals were to range from debates and cricket matches to celebrations of the Prophet’s birthday. The option to attend MAO College in which both their moral and intellectual upbringing was to be tended to, promised to create a new Indian scholar, and not just a Muslim one, who would in their pedagogy resolve the bifurcation of the secular and religious. As Lelyveld explains, Khan’s proposals were ultimately too controversial for the larger Muslim community. The curriculum agreed upon was complex, blending Islamic theology with pragmatic, technical education, which carried the taint of political compromise.
In the 1920s, a young man from the Punjab province was visiting extended family in this college town in Uttar Pradesh. Sheikh Abdur Rashid was so taken by the culture of the college, now renamed Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), that he decided to pursue his studies there. This forced him to be separated from his wife, Fahmida, and their newborn child. After earning his degree, he was hired as a professor in the History department, and moved into faculty housing at 8 Shibli Road with his family.
It is here that the artist Zarina (1937-2020) was born and raised. She, too, would attend AMU, which had begun granting degrees to women the year the artist was born, and study mathematics, though she was always keen on architecture. Zarina returns to this house in Aligarh in her late work, including Home is a Foreign Place (1999), House with Four Walls (1991) and Directions To My House (2001). The image of a floor plan entitled Ghar/Home opens the portfolio of thirty-six woodcuts in Home is a Foreign Place (1999). Under the image is the word ‘Ghar’ in Urdu Nastaliq calligraphy, below which, in pencil, Zarina translates it as ‘Home’ in English. This floor plan has been abstracted, whittled down from previous works Aba ka ghar / Father’s House (1898-1994) and My House (1994). This floorplan has been simplified and abstracted. It is organized in two zones, the mardana or men’s space at the top, and the zenana or women’s space at the bottom. A circle locates us near the more circuitous entry to the zenana, the space within which I argue Home is a Foreign Place is set.
II.
Almost a century later, I, a doctoral student of art history, traveled to Aligarh in the summer of 2017 to visit the “red brick house” with its “bougainvillea covered fence” that Zarina memorializes in Directions To My House. Zarina was a part of a milieu of post-independence, modernist artists of Muslim origin whom I was interested in. When she heard of my trip, she seemed pleased and implied that one could only get a perspective on her work by knowing a bit about her childhood in Aligarh. From my extensive conversations with Zarina Apa in New York, I understood that it was important for her that people know her in both contexts, India and the United States.
I was accompanied to Aligarh by a friend, the artist Uzma Mohsin, who had recently begun researching her next project on photographic archives of Muslim modernists in Aligarh. Mohsin had also grown up on Shibli Road, and her parents had been friends with Zarina’s family. Her familiarity with the place emboldened us to knock on the front door of a house that still served as a residence on the street. We introduced ourselves to the current residents, who kindly allowed us to wander through their house and out into a large courtyard with arched verandas. I looked up at the sun. The walls framed the sky in a way I recognized from Home is a Foreign Place. In standalone prints entitled asman, sitarey, suraj, and chand (sky, stars, sun and moon) the artist conjured this very scene from her memories of years spent gazing at the sky. In place of a horizon, the walls of the courtyard served as a datum line between the ground and the sky, depicted in the stand alone print Dewar/Wall. Zarina recalled: “Within these four walls my world revolved. Here I looked at the Sky, imagined the Earth, closed my eyes to the scorching Sun and counted the stages of the moon.”
There is a black-and-white photograph from the 1950s shot in a courtyard, similar to where I stood, of Zarina as a child. She is sitting on the ground beside her elder sister Rani—both their hands clasped around their knees. They look toward the photographer with soft gazes, revealing that they knew the person behind the camera, dupattas loosely wrapped around their heads. That hot summer day, I scanned for a garden that wasn’t there. Zarina often mentioned her mother tending to hers, the scents of its fruits and flowers marking the change of seasons in the north Indian town.
III.
Few have observed that much of Zarina’s work emerges from the zenana: the women’s space of the home. This offers us not just a perspective on householding by young Muslim women in the early twentieth century but the singular perspective offered by Zarina that went in the face of prevailing feminist perspectives, without kowtowing to religious authorities. Zarina’s House With Four Walls (1991), is a portfolio of seven etchings, letterpress and chine colle accompanied by text. It opens with a recurrent motif in her work, an image that contains both a plan and an unfolded elevation. Here it is the courtyard of a home, its walls folding open like petals of a flower. In Zarina’s text, which resembles a poem, she moves between the present and past tense, recalling the seasons and rituals of everyday life in Aligarh, alongside omens and premonitions of the future, in which her family’s displacement and exile are foretold. She writes:
Far away was a house with four walls
The black snake came in the house
On rainy nights
The ghost stopped by the pillar
I run outside to play and burn my feet
On long summer afternoons everyone slept
One night we heard the owl in the trees
The one-eyed maid said
We would have to move far away
In pre-partition India, the phrase “chaar diwari” or “four walls” was associated with living in purdah, a custom observed by both Hindu and Muslim families prior to partition. Both types of families practiced gendered separation in their homes which involved a mardana, or space that was predominantly occupied by male guests and their visitors, and a zenana, a space of reproductive labor largely comprised of women, children and household staff of all genders.
Historically, the phrase is a transposition into Hindu/Urdu from Surah al-Ahzab in the Quran. This surah was often cited by Sunni ulema in postcolonial Pakistan to support, in increasingly strident ways, the normative expectation that women’s work solely revolved around the home. The phrase acquired pejorative connotations for leftist feminists across South Asia as it came to be used in the legal injunction that women wear a chaadar or covering and stay within the confines of the walls of their homes, during the military rule of General Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan. Its meaning remains debated by feminist scholars.
The phrase “chadar aur chaar-diwari” was subsequently adopted as a slogan, or nara, by protestors including the Women’s Action Forum (WAF) against the Hudood ordinances, Islamic criminal laws based upon Hanafi jurisprudence, introduced by General Zia-ul-Haq in 1979. This slogan, marking the limits being imposed on women’s sovereignty through law and punishment, catalyzed the women’s movement in the 1980s. In defiance of Zia’s Hudood ordinances the protestors revived the 1966 Urdu poem by Fahmida Riaz “chadar aur chaar-diwari.” In her nazm, translated by Rukhsana Ahmed, Riaz writes:
Bring this show to an end now
Sire, cover it up now
Not I, but you need this chadur now.
For my person is not merely a symbol of your lust:
Across the highways of life, sparkles my intelligence
If a bead of sweat sparkles on the earth’s brow it is
my diligence.
These four walls, this chadur I wish upon the rotting carcass. In the open air, her sails flapping, races ahead my ship.
I am the companion of the New Adam
Who has earned my self-assured love.
Zarina uses the English translation of “chaar diwari” in the title of her portfolio House with Four Walls (1991). From its feminist connotations of being an imposed restriction, she turns the phrase on its head to ask, who even has a home? In other words, chaar diwari assumes that women have a place to dwell, to live in. By doing this she brings her own experience into play in reinterpreting the words, as a child of partition. In 1947, a ten year old Zarina fled Aligarh for Delhi with her mother and sisters, where they lived in a refugee camp in the old city.
In House with Four Walls I see Zarina foreground the privilege of having a home in which to take shelter. If a female identifying person is a migrant or refugee, or unhoused, the meaning of the phrase surely transforms to privilege expressions of dispossession and exile above gender restrictions. “How many women have the choice to live in chador (veil) and chaar diwari?” Zarina observed in a conversation with Ranu Samantrai. “People suffer from violence, they lose their homes to riot and war, their chaar diwari are taken from them.” Zarina reminds us that as India celebrated the country’s independence from British rule, she was made a refugee, a premonition itself of the difficulties Muslims, and other marginalized and lower caste communities, would face in “postcolonial” India. Throughout her life, Zarina remained preoccupied with minoritarian existence and the conditions of life for refugees and stateless people.
IV.
Zarina was a news junky. Every day she would listen to the radio and watch the evening news on her television set. The reportage around the time she made the works discussed above included the demolition of the Babri masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh (UP), by far-right activists.
Its demolition ignited street protests and communal tension throughout India and destabilized neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh with retaliation riots. Zarina listened, too, to the news about police violence against Black Americans, the Israeli invasion of Beirut, the Tompkins Square Park riot, the war in Iraq, 9/11, the so-called global war on terror, and the Rohingya refugee crisis, which her work made reference to. Were she alive today, there is no doubt in my mind that Zarina would be making work about Palestine.
In a correspondence with Aamir Mufti, Zarina wondered whether she might even be considered an Urdu artist “rather than an Indian (or Pakistani) one.” Although she uses Urdu in her work, Zarina grew up in a multilingual context. Her parents were conversant in Urdu and Punjabi, while her father was also fluent in English and Persian. Over the last decade, Zarina’s home at 8 Shibli Road was demolished to make space for an Urdu Academy that looms over the site today. It is an irony that would have made her laugh—that the home which once enabled householding by young Muslim women who found it to be a shelter till it was no more, now houses an institute for learning an indigenous language under siege in the country of its birth.
This irony is borne out by the Indian Supreme Court needing to make clear Urdu’s indigeneity. It recently upheld a decision for Urdu to continue to be used on a municipal building in Maharashtra in a landmark case, writing: “The prejudice against Urdu stems from the misconception that Urdu is alien to India. This opinion, we are afraid, is incorrect as Urdu, like Marathi and Hindi, is an Indo-Aryan language. It is a language which was born in this land. Urdu developed and flourished in India due to the need of people belonging to different cultural milieus who wanted to exchange ideas and communicate amongst themselves.” The justices continue: “Language is not religion. Language does not even represent religion. Language belongs to a community, to a region, to a people.” The attempt to excise a language that maps onto the body of its purported community of speakers, gives credence to concerns by the Genocide watch group that one is underway in India. Maybe the loss of home deepens a connection to language, so that Home is a Foreign Place, the work with which this piece began, becomes a form of mnemonic preservation against annihilation.
Home is a Foreign Place is many things, a repository of the spatial world of householding in Zarina’s childhood home, a translation of the gendered organization of domestic spaces before partition, a translation of Urdu words into images, a record of the passage of seasons in north India, and a memorial to a home in fragments, conjured from memory and carved into wood block, to be arranged and rearranged in their installation. That work and the others discussed here also exceed these registers, ciphers challenging us to read and reread her work always anew.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the region known as “the Slave Coast” and its hinterland consisted of several different kingdoms. The dominant kingdom in the last half of the seventeenth century was Allada but by 1720, the kingdom of Dahomey was ascendant. Most of the other kingdoms in the region became vassals, while Dahomey functioned as a tributary state to the Yoruba empire of Oyo. As Robin Law has shown, Dahomey is often referred to as Fon or Affong, which is today an ethnic and linguistic category. Aside from Dahomey and Allada, the kingdom of Whydah (or Fida/Ouidah) was an important polity, and the coastal town called Whydah was one of the most important slave trading ports for the transatlantic slave trade.
In memory of Zarina (1937-2020)
Masthead image: Zarina and her elder sister Rani in the courtyard of their home in Aligarh, circa 1940/50s. Photographer unknown. © Zarina; Courtesy of the artist.
householding