Travels with Rani

Zarina has worked in a variety of media and forms. At the core of her practice is printmaking, especially woodcut, but also etching. Her practice raises broader issues concerning homelessness and dispossession in the modern world.Travels with Rani maps the places that Zarina visited with her sister, against a background composed of the names of the places they traveled to written in Urdu. Although their trips took them to both India and Pakistan, the artist has deliberately left out the border in her diagram. Urdu, written in the nastaliq style of Persian script, was widely used by Muslims in India until Partition, when it became the official language of Pakistan, and its usage in India declined. About this the artist has written:”I chose Urdu not for the beauty of the calligraphy or the exoticism of its aesthetics. I was placing my work in a historical moment, capturing a time when one wrote and read in Urdu. Urdu was born in Delhi; Amir Khusrau called it Hindawi, the language of Hindustan. Now we are witnessing the slow death of this language in the same city.”