Artist Salima Hashmi: ‘We added hideaways to contemplate the world in’

Salima Hashmi’s home in Lahore’s upscale Model Town neighbourhood is a large, wood-framed Raj-era bungalow filled to bursting with a cultural clutter of art, family photos and books lining countless shelves. But despite being where the artist, teacher and curator has lived for more than 55 years, the house is no museum piece. Hashmi and her family tend a cultural flame that casts a broader light across south Asia and the wider world.

An airy veranda leads on to a hallway, where green fanlight windows project a serene light throughout a labyrinth of rooms. Unlike other houses in the neighbourhood, Hashmi’s has retained its “typical British bungalow” layout, with two main reception rooms and discreet daftars, or workspaces, on either side of the veranda.

At 82, Hashmi continues to create the mixed media artworks that have brought her to prominence, which meld the personal with themes of social justice and the plight of women. She remains a force in the art scene in Pakistan’s cultural capital and continues to bring south Asian art and artists to an international stage. And in her decades of teaching — at Lahore’s National College of Arts before becoming dean at Beaconhouse National University’s School of Visual Arts and Design — she has mentored some of the country’s most renowned artists, including Shahzia Sikander, Imran Qureshi and Aisha Khalid. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the back of her house incorporates an art gallery, open to the public, in what used to be a garage. Works by Brooklyn-based Pakistani artist Ruby Chishti are currently on show.

From an armchair by the fireplace in the living room, Hashmi greets me wearing an informal but chic trouser and kurta, scarf draped over one shoulder, bangles and canary-yellow loafers with coloured patterned socks reminiscent of a painting by Joan Miró. “In Pakistan, we introduced some of those who became the stars of the art world,” Hashmi says, serving tea, salted nuts and dates.

The house was built around 1929-30 by Hashmi’s late husband’s grandfather, a judge, she tells me. His family already had a house in Lahore’s old city, and Model Town was just emerging as a suburb for the city’s wealthy professionals. Today it is one of Lahore’s most well-heeled precincts; Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is among those with a house here. Hashmi and her husband moved here in 1969, and the house quickly became “a refuge, a lively meeting centre for artists, writers, political figures, and a shelter for activists”, Hashmi says, including the leader of the leftist Mazdoor Kisan party in the 1970s and women whose families had disowned them because of their relationships with people from different sects.

Hashmi comes from a family of cultural and political agitators: leftwing Pakistani intellectuals whose views have at various times landed them in hot water. Her father, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, was a renowned Urdu poet; her late husband Shoaib Hashmi, who died in 2023, was a prominent artist, director and TV writer who created the satirical TV programme Such Gup (the Urdu translates roughly as “Truth and Gossip”).

She herself has just co-curated an exhibition at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies — (Un)Layering the Future Past of South Asia: Young Artists’ Voices — featuring the work of exiled Afghan artist Sher Ali. One of the multiple hats Hashmi wears is director of the Unesco Madanjeet Singh Institute of South Asian Arts, which runs a scholarship programme for students from across south Asia. 

The art gallery in her own home is part of a series of domestic reimaginings the couple established when they became its custodians. “We added new hideaways, made cupboards, and discovered little hidey-holes and made them into nooks to contemplate the world in,” Hashmi says, guiding me through the main hallway, where paintings, drawings and photos, having filled all the wall space, spill over on to tables.

We added hideaways, made cupboards, and discovered little hidey-holes and nooks to contemplate the world in

She points out a portrait of her father by the Indian photographer Raghu Rai. He had moved the family from Delhi to Lahore in February 1947, on the eve of Partition, and set up the Pakistan Times; he spent five years in jail in the early 1950s for his revolutionary views, she tells me.

“And that’s my wedding photograph,” Hashmi says, pointing to a black and white photo. The couple met on the set of an Urdu-language student production of She Stoops to Conquer in the early 1960s. They married in 1965.

The couple settled into Lahore’s rich cultural scene, but at different times each faced repercussions for their political activism. In 1981 Shoaib spent three months in jail — along with journalists, politicians and lawyers seen as a “threat to public safety” during dictator Zia-ul-Haq’s martial law. In 2007 Hashmi was one of several prominent Pakistani women detained under house arrest for about two weeks when Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency and suspended the country’s constitution.  

Off the main living room is a suite of rooms which have been converted to accommodate her son Yasser Hashmi (named after Yasser Arafat, she tells me) and his family. As we talk, a small boy emerges — Hashmi’s grandson, who, she proudly says, just won a junior chess championship in Karachi. 

On the opposite side of the hall, a similar suite is devoted to her daughter Mira (her name is a derivative of mir, the Russian word for “peace”, and a nod to the 16th-century Indian poet Mirabai). Mira is currently based in London while her children attend university in the UK but a Sri Lankan artist, Sakunthala, a former student of Hashmi’s, is temporarily living in the rooms. “I refuse to take any rent,” Hashmi says, “so she occasionally delights us with a Sri Lankan meal.”

Hashmi has now shepherded me into a back living room of the house, with turquoise walls — there are flashes of vivid colour throughout the home — and lined with yet more bookcases and artworks. “This is my sort of private sitting room — you know, if I have a student come by, or an old friend; a more quiet and intimate space.” Behind, there is a kitchen, which Hashmi’s extended family sometimes use. “We only have meals together on Sundays because people have very different timings,” she laughs. They also meet for a big “traditional breakfast” to celebrate the two Eid holidays. 

Behind the house is a courtyard leading to Hashmi’s studio. On a worktable filled with tubes of paints is a mixed-media work: a photograph of her family, with paint applied; part of a series “on the fungibility of the family”, she says. Hashmi has long embraced mixed-media formats; a means to question how art was traditionally taught and made in south Asia. “I had been dissatisfied with oil and canvas for a long time,” she says. “I found it ponderous — and also the behaviour of oil and canvas in the tropics is difficult because it expands in the summer.”

The artist has also long questioned Pakistan’s patriarchal norms, and was involved in the Women’s Action Forum, the only feminist organisation that was allowed to work publicly under Zia-ul-Haq. In 1983 the Hashmi family bungalow’s front living room hosted a group who signed a women’s artists manifesto, a copy of which she displays in the studio — she says, “to discourage me from being frivolous”. 

This is a house where some of the objects not only tell stories, but seem to speak back. “This home has seen much over its 100 years,” she says. “We took it over in 1969 and transformed it — or perhaps it has changed us.” 

“(Un)Layering the Future Past of South Asia: Young Artists’ Voices”, co-curated by Salima Hashmi; until June 21; Soas.ac.uk

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