Notes on a Fragment: Zarina’s Dividing Line

Abstract

This essay provides a new reading of Zarina’s iconic woodcut print Dividing Line (2001), with an eye to unravelling the work’s relationship to the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent and the wider landscape of partition history. By considering Zarina’s use of paper, map and gouge, this reading argues that Dividing Line embodies a method and ethics of writing decolonial histories of partition, with important implications for how to understand and respond to the violent impact of postcolonial border-making on (art) history. The essay, written as a series of notes, seeks to account for the distinct forms and temporalities of writing for partition history that Dividing Line both produces and demands of the art historian. In its form, the essay mobilises the note as a fragmentary mode of writing, responsive to the specific dynamics of continuity and discontinuity endemic to the experience of lines, borders and partition in Dividing Line.