Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is a twentieth-century historian who works across disciplines, is deeply committed to collaborative intellectual projects, and experiments with form. She is perhaps best known for her book The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. While the concerns of that book—decolonization, refugees, border-making, minorities, citizenship—remain vital to her scholarship, over the years the visual archive has come to preoccupy her writing and practice.
Collaborations on film-making and new Pakistani cinema led to the edited collection Love, War and Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in Pakistan. Another series on Art History from the South found form in the collection How Secular is Art? On the Politics of Art, History and Religion in South Asia (with Tapati Guha-Thakurta) and in a special issue of Art Margins on “Art History, Postcolonialism and the Global Turn.” She has also written about the work of contemporary artists, mostly friends, worked with museums, and co-curated an exhibition at Kunsthalle Taxispalais entitled Ich bin Anders, weil Ich kann das / Stranger Belongs to Me.
She is presently completing a book, Anticolonial Practice and the Image Archive: Notes on Art, Repair and the Writing of Indian History, which takes on debates on restitution, archaeology, art history, photography, film, war, and the anticolonial struggle on the Indo-Afghan borderlands. As a digital humanities project, short films and images have been made for arguments of this book, and were shown in a solo show, Anticolonial, at Canvas Gallery in Karachi in 2023. A Suitable Agency is representing When We Are Strangers, a graphic novel with Sarnath Banerjee, that comes out of long walks together during the pandemic and this research. The graphic novel has been supported by three grants from Brown University where she is based.
She has appeared on Christopher Lydon’s Open Source Radio and the BBC Radio series Museum of Lost Objects, and her articles have appeared in e-flux, Hyperallergic, Third Text, Times of India, The News, Dawn, Time Out Delhi, Caravan, Current History, and The Wire.