The art of painting Urdu

Six ghazals by six poets about the hankering heart. Urdu couplets with “dil” as their thematic lynchpin tightly fitted in vertical columns drawn on a page. The calligraphic text stacked in silos look like shards shaped like crescent moons, or mourning bodies.

The rendered ghazals include “kab tak dil ki khair manae” by Faiz and “ranjish hi sahi, dil dukhane ke liye aa” by Faraz. At the base of each ghazal-filled column is a drawing of a disembodied, perambulatory heart.

This work, titled Dil… Meer, Ghalib, Iqbal, Faiz, Faraz-o-Jaun ki Zubani (2020) by Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai is part of her series Nafas or Isolation Diaries. The artworks emerged from the letters she wrote to her absent husband, while in confinement during the pandemic at her parents’ house in Najibabad, Uttar Pradesh. It was the first time Ahmadzai used copious Urdu text in her artistic practice.

Tapping into the expressive potential of the language, Nafas gives shape to the fictions of Ahmadzai’s private loneliness, and the pleasure and displeasure of waiting, through references to Urdu poets, fables and events. This lends a literary framework to the artist’s interior world by placing it within a constellation of poetic allusions. The letters are also filled with painted figures and leitmotifs of Ahmadzai’s visual repertoire, including...

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