Bangkok was Zarina’s first home after Aligarh and her first sustained encounter with a life made through travel. It was also where printmaking became her medium.
Bangkok 1958–1961 · from Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines, 1997
A first posting
Looking beyond diplomatic life
Soon after Zarina married Saad Hashmi in 1958, his first diplomatic posting took them to Bangkok. She was captivated by the golden temple spires and by sunlight moving across their surfaces. Decades later, gold would enter a practice long associated with black, white, and grey.
The formal expectations of life as a diplomat’s wife did not suit her. She turned instead toward the city, its language, local culture, and art. At a diplomatic gathering she noticed a Japanese woodblock print and began asking how it had been made.
Printmaking
The medium that stayed
Zarina began studying woodcut with a Thai artist teaching at Silpakorn University. The technique gave her a direct physical relation to the image: carving, inking, pressure, paper, and the repeated impression of a block.
After two years in Thailand, she and Saad returned to India. The city was temporary, but the medium she discovered there became the most consistent thread in her working life.
“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 · legacy family site, courtesy A/P/A Institute at NYU
Family 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 · family archiveZarina and Saad · Angkor Wat, 1959–60 · family archiveTemple architecture · Bangkok years · family archive
