In 1947, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British barrister who had never visited India before, was commissioned to delineate a line bifurcating British India. He was handed outdated maps and obsolete census data to divide the country primarily based on religious demographics. A few weeks later, on August 17th, the Radcliffe Line was announced, formalising the Partition of India and Pakistan. But an imposed border is never an abstract cartographic experiment; it is an incision both geographical and psychological that reconstructs the map and the people. To map this trauma in art, however, is to witness a chasm in the visual vocabularies depicting the Partition. While Satish Gujral relies on an expressionist corporeal representation of the psychological trauma, Zarina Hashmi, who preferred to be known professionally only be her first name, presents a minimalist rendering of the cartographic rupture.
The Corporeal and the Cartographic
A man kneeling on the ground is supported by two men beside him; his clenched fists, upwards gaze, and anguished grimace capture the titular emotion: despair.
Gujral was 22 during the Partition. Forced to leave Lahore, his family relocated to Shimla and subsequently to Delhi. His understanding of the Partition was informed by his personal experience as a refugee and his father’s involvement in refugee rehabilitation, on account of which he witnessed the plight of the refugees: separations, violence, and deaths. Because Gujral spent a few months escorting refugees across the border and going to refugee camps, his creative language became inextricably tied to what he observed around him: the human body and its experience of anguish.
From then to the early 1950s, he channelled these experiences into his Partition series. Depicting the corporeal expression of refugees mourning, wailing, and writhing in despair, he strips down layers of entrenched psychological trauma into the physicality of emotions. The human body dominates his canvases as enlarged contorted figures, highly theatrical in their gestures, encompass a major part of the composition.
While Gujral maps the trauma through the human body, Zarina employs a wider, panoramic approach: the cartographic representation of the geographical border. Born in Aligarh, Zarina experienced the Partition when she was just 10. Several years later, in 2001, she created Dividing Line, a woodcut print that leaves an indelible impression on anyone who has encountered it.
The print features a ragged black line on plain white paper. This minimalist rendering strips down the Partition to its cartographic origin—a singular, arbitrary line imposed on a nation. Unlike the expressive, corporeal portrayals of Gujral, this aesthetic of restraint is quintessential to Zarina’s practice. She captures the border not as a historical event, but as a lifelong geography of exile.
The State of Being and Remembering
Painting in the aftermath of the Partition, Gujral’s work was shrouded in the immediacy of expression, serving as a raw archive of the histories and narratives of people before they were forgotten. The Partition Series captured the contemporary anguished reality of 1947—a crisis of the flesh. The figures in Gujral’s paintings have their faces twisted in anguish, occasionally obscured through gestures or heavy drapery. This strips them off their individual identity, and instead reflects a collective experience: a story that belongs to millions. He traps these figures in claustrophobic compositions mirroring the suffocating atmosphere of the refugee camps and trains he navigated through.
While Gujral’s work was rooted in experience and the urgency of now, Zarina’s art was a meditation on the past, situated in retrospection and remembering. She endeavoured to portray the enduring questions the displacement left about home and belonging. Following the Partition she led a peripatetic lifestyle, particularly after her marriage to an IFS diplomat, migrating to places across the globe before she settled in New York. This theme of impermanence, displacement, and the questions about home became a major motif in her works. Her series of woodcut prints titled Home is a Foreign Place was an attempt to weave together the memories of her childhood home she had to leave behind. She started by compiling a list of words that reminded her of home, such as ‘sky and ‘distance’, and asked a calligrapher in Pakistan to write the words in the Nastiliq script in Urdu. She then made abstract pictorial depictions of these words, using the reclamation of her native language as the first step towards printmaking.
The Dichotomy of Visual Language
Gujral’s Partition series is predominated by deep and earthy tones that are characteristic of the intensity of anguish. His oil paintings are texturally heavy with expressive brushstrokes and the use of impasto that express the intensity of despair and anguish. Gujral’s aesthetic language was dominated by expressionist characteristics such as distorted figures, raw colours, and textural intensity, reminiscent of notable expressionist works like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
If Gujral’s paintings are a manifestation of the screams of refugees, Zarina’s prints reflect the silent disorder they carried with them. Before turning her focus towards artistic practice, Zarina graduated in mathematics. She later trained in printmaking in Bangkok, Paris, and Tokyo. Her artistic language is a confluence of her fascination with lines, architecture, and geometry from her studies and the quiet restraint of printmaking as a medium. Opting for minimal depictions, her works distil overwhelming questions of displacement into elegant, visual planes.
Ultimately, Gujral and Zarina’s artworks create a visual juxtaposition: one preserves the history of people by capturing human trauma with visceral immediacy, while the other historicizes the shifting geography of the state through a lifetime of exile. Though both artists are tethered to the same historical rupture, their opposite conceptual and aesthetic preferences provide a bigger picture of the Partition—proving that a political border is simultaneously a crisis of the bleeding flesh and a permanent, silent distortion of space.
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