“What’s not to like?,” a fellow critic concurred as I waxed lyrical about Zarina’s solo show, which I had seen a few days before in Delhi. The opening was timed to coincide with the India Art Fair, around which a number of glittering events have coalesced in what has become the country’s art capital. Inscribed in gold, the black cardboard invitation and matching catalog cover depict the bare outline of a golden house from Folding House (2014), a set of 25 collages from which the exhibition takes its title. A house divided, and split down the middle by a neat dividing line, unmistakably alludes to the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. As a child growing up in Northern India (she was born in 1937), the artist experienced firsthand the massive population displacement and bloodshed that ensued; her work could hardly be accused of lacking political edge. But the critic’s question—with its hint of underlying criticism and the implication that Zarina’s delicate creations, fashioned out of precious and handmade materials, were simply too alluring for their own good—nagged at me. To be sure, there is an element of material fetishism in the artist’s work, as the elaborate and at times long-winded …