Rummana Hussain

Rummana Hussain (1952–1999) was an Indian conceptual, visual, and performance artist best known for her multi-media and installation-based work exploring “female subjectivity trapped in discourses of family, religion, nationalism, and welfare.”^[1][2][3][4]

Hussain was born in Bangalore, India to a prominent Muslim family with aristocratic ancestry. Her paternal family, the Habibullahs, were taluqdars (also known as landed gentry) from Awadh’s Barabanki district.^[5] Her father, Major General Enaith Bahadur Habibullah, was the first commandant of the National Defence Academy (Khadakwasla, Pune) and her mother, Hamida Habibullah, was a politician and social worker. She had two siblings: Wajahat Habibullah, a former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer and politician, and Nazli Siddiqui, a medical professional.^[6][7][8]

From 1972 to 1974, Hussain studied fine arts at the Ravensbourne College of Art and Design, United Kingdom.^[9]

After completing her graduation, Hussain returned to India and married Ishaat Hussain, an Indian businessman and former interim chairman of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). Between 1983 and 1985, she lived in Kolkata, and worked with Paritosh Sen at his studio.^[10]

In the early 1985, after her husband was transferred to Bihar for work, Hussain moved to Delhi and joined Garhi Studios, a multi-disciplinary art space supported by the state-run Lalit Kala Akademi. During her four years at Garhi, she connected with other contemporary Indian artists, including painter Manjit Bawa, sculptor and textile artist Mrinalini Mukherjee, and mixed-media artist Navjot Altaf.^[10][11] At the time, contemporary Indian art scene veered towards the overarching trend of figuration that was principally ushered in by the “Baroda school” of painters, many of whom, including Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Sudhir Patwardhan and Bhupen Khakhar, were affiliated with the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, but traveled to or lived in Mumbai. Inspired by the scene, Hussain began developing her own figurative painterly practice in alignment with her social and aesthetic concerns.

Owning to The Emergency, a 21-month period between 1975 and 1977 when civil liberations were suspended by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Hussain, like many of her fellow artists, felt necessary to use figuration as a medium to "convey and interrogate issues central to the human condition, namely violence, corruption, ritualism and exploitation." She also believed that a “semisculptural, figurative form” would ensure that the art was accessible to all classes, and consequently achieve greater “receptiveness.”^[11]

Mukherjee and Altaf offered critiques on Hussain’s neoexpressionist figurations, with the former apparently openly reprimanding her for her “bad paintings.” Hussain’s preoccupation with German playwright Bertolt Brecht and Dutch-Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel directly manifested in her practice, and in her painting When Evil Doing Comes Like Falling Rain, Nobody Calls Out Stop (c.1989–90) that portrays hell and human suffering through a “fiery mountain of human heads and figures with bat-like wings flying over a congested, chaotic landscape.”^[11]

Similar to the works of fellow painters Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh and Arpita Singh, her use of “myth, metaphor and allegory contrasted with stark modern-day reality to convey social messages.” However, unlike these artists, she struggled to find the “exact visual language” to best express her concerns. In Big Fish Eat Little Fish-1 (1989), meant to be a “glaringly obvious criticism of Indian capitalist and caste structures,” she painted two obscure figures rowing a small boat in an tempt to cross “a murky, treacherous sea” while a “gargantuan fish consumes its smaller brethren.” Similar preoccupations are observed in The Angel and Colaba (1990) that depicts a “shadowy, aquatic landscape” mirroring the fishing docks in Colaba, Mumbai, packed with “fishermen hauling carts of produce” as domestic animals and “gaunt, scantily clad figures” occupy the neighbouring street. Across the skies and “seemingly away from the grim situation below,” a “bronzed angel with glowing, fuchsia wings” is seen carrying a “darkened figure of a woman.”^[11][10]

After the 1989 murder of activist, poet and playwright Safdar Hashmi in Sahibabad, Uttar Pradesh, a group of more than sixty artists, curators, and writers, including Hussain, Manjit Bawa, Atul Dodiya, Subodh Gupta, Zarina Hashmi, Ram Rahman, Geeta Kapur, M. K. Raina, Vivan Sundaram, Bharti Kher, Pushpamala N., Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh, and Bhisham Sahni, formed the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) to promote “secularism and pluralism” in India through the arts. They staged “activist exhibitions,” and mobilized “protest performances” across the country; their most notable campaigns included Artists Against Communalism (1991), a series of artist-led performances held in several cities, under which, SEHMAT mounted a touring exhibition Images and words: Artists Against Communalism (1992) comprising paintings, photographs, poems and statements from eminent artists.^[12][13]Hussain, who was living in Mumbai at the time, became one of SAHMAT’s key local coordinators.^[11]

The late 1980s and early 1990s were marked by widespread communal violence and social unrest in India, culminating in the demolition of the 16th-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya by Vishva Hindu Parishad and allied organisations.^[14][15] According to Rahman: “It was the most shocking thing that had happened at a national level in our lives. It really shattered our idea of ourselves, as a modern nation and a culture. And as artists who had a stake in that culture, it attacked every cultural mooring that we had.” The demolition followed months-long communal riots across several cities leading to the deaths of 2,000–3,000 people; Mumbai was among the “worst affected” cities recording an estimated 900 deaths over six weeks.^[16][17][11] As the riots reached Mumbai, Hussain, fearing for her life and the safety of her family, removed the nameplate from outside her home, and sought refuge in a nearby hotel with her husband and young daughter. “It shocked her,” Rahman recalled, “It was an invasion into her protected, personal space. Suddenly she felt as if her Muslim identity was being thrust upon her.”^[11]

A few weeks later, in January 1993, Hussain participated in an interdisciplinary, seventeen-hour performance organized by SAHMAT, featuring Sufi-Bhakti music that originated during the eighth- and twelfth- century reform movements to promote “tolerance, spirituality and harmony between religions.” The title of the Delhi-based event, “Anhad Garje (transl: the silence reverberates)” was inspired by the medieval poetry of Sufi saint Kabir. The following month, writing for The Independent, Hussain said: “It’s necessary to emerge from our insular shells, to come together and try and develop symbols of secularism...a coming together of artists and viewers is a form of public participation, one that emphasizes the commonality of all.” During the event, Hussain, accompanied by Sundaram and Altaf, created “a cosmic river in the sky” on the roof of the tented venue, and inscribed poetry and calligraphy on the walls.^[11]

After returning from Anhad Garje, Hussain began working with terracotta pots to create “sensuous new installations” for Fragments/Multiples (1994), her first solo exhibition at Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road, which memorialized the Babri Masjid, and “traced the ripple effects set off by its destruction across other sectors of human interaction than the politics of the Stale.”^[11][18] In Dissected Projection (c.1993), six broken fragments from a terracotta pot, meant to represent the “shards” from the Babri Masjid, were placed on a mirror-topped rectangular box. Looming over the box was a “black, bisected pot” that “protrudes like a pregnant belly from the wall.” A beam of light projected on this wall showed the “distorted shadows of the two domes, halved and shattered,” serving as “ephemeral yet material reminders of the violent anti-Muslim pogroms, in particular, the riots in Bombay (December 1992–January 1993).” A transparent box sat at the foot of the installation, containing loose rubble to represent “the whole being splintered and abstracted,” forcing the viewer to reckon with the destruction of Babri Masjid, and the subsequent “disintegration of the collective imagination of India.”^[19][11] Many of her canvas- and paper-based pieces from the exhibition also incorporated the recurrent motif of the Masjid’s dome. In Behind a Thin Film (1993), Hussain used indigo and earth pigment, as well as layered Xerox prints, to juxtapose the Tower of Babel with the “Hindu mob standing atop the Babri Masjid.”^[19]

Hussain’s other installations for the exhibition, including Conflux, Resonance, and Fragment from Splitting (all c.1993), also used everyday materials, such as broken terracotta pots, wood, mirrors, gheru (a red-ochre clay pigment), and neel (an indigo pigment used as a clothes-whitener), as recurring motifs of oppression.^[19] The “sombre palette” of “earth-red, cobalt blue, and indigo coalesce”^[18], according to Bharati Chaturvedi of The Indian Express, further “drives home the understanding be­tween the woman and nature as a feminine force, as well as the politics of housekeeping.”^[20] In an installation featuring indigo-pigmented fabric-pieces hung on a clothesline, Hussain drew a parallel between the manifestations of oppression in the colonial past (British exploitation of Indian indigo-growers and the “free” present (unpaid housework being traditionally performed by women and girls) to showcase that “labour is always physical and violence first hurts the most vulnerable.”^[21][20]

The iconography of the vagina occupies a specific centrality in Hussain’s exhibited work; she uses it repeatedly, “as fis­sure, as source, as wound.”^[18] In Tunnel Echoes (1994), she groups together five different versions of the vaginal form: “a pencil drawing; an ink drawing on paper, an etching; the zinc plate from which the etching was pulled; and a gypsum board bearing the solid image.”^[18] Love over Reason and Yoni (both c.1993) combine “evocations of the female body” with “visions of scarred landscapes,” using charcoal, neel, terracotta, and gherua on paper, to mirror “the violent intrusion of history into the realm of the personal, the intimate, and the sexual.”^[22]

Besides Chemould, Fragments/Multiples was also showcased at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai and later travelled to the Little Theatre Group (LTG) Gallery, New Delhi. Altaf praised the “conceptual and symbolic elements” of the exhibition, which, according to her, “borrowed from feminist concerns regarding the language that a work of art produces.”^[11] Writing for The Times of India, Indian poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote, said the exhibition “represents the response of a woman artist who found herself, on grounds of religion, suddenly exposed to an irrational assault engineered by cold ideological machinations.” He commended Hussain for articulating “the con­nections between oppression premised on ethnicity and op­pression premised on gender” through her installations.^[18]

In 1995, Altaf and her daughter Sasha, as well as Nancy Adajania, Shireen Gandhy, and Shakuntala Kulkarni amongst others, were invited to participate in Living on the Margins (1995), Hussain’s inaugural performance art piece, at the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai. On the day of the performance, she slowly walked around the open courtyard with her feet adorned with ghungroos, her outstretched hands holding a halved papaya, and her mouth wide open “in a soundless primeval scream.” After thirty minutes, exhausted from having subjected herself to “various forms of physical stress,” she invited the audience to splatter gheru and indigo powder onto the floor as a participatory gesture. Jyoti Dhar writing for the Art Asia Pacific journal said that Hussain “seemed perfectly in her element” during the performance and “at ease with the form of her work.” Some audience members later admitted to having never witnessed “anything like this in India,” as they watched the artist with a “mixture of rapture and bewilderment,” unable to ascertain what she will do next. Sasha Altaf, describing the impact of the “this experimental, ephemeral work” on the small gathering of Hussain’s cultural peers, noted that the performance “explored the public and the private, the self and the other,” as Hussain questioned her identity as well as “discovered the feminine.” She said: “Hussain boldly put her body at the center of this piece, which touched upon wider social issues, such as the rise of women participating in and being victims of violence, as well as on specific private issues, such as Hussain’s recent discovery that one of her domestic staff had ovarian cancer and another had contracted AIDS. The latter could no longer close her mouth due to the high level of infection-driven ulceration, is believed to have directly influenced Hussain’s performance.^[11]

Hussain was invited to be an artist-in-residence at Art in General in New York City, in 1998, just a year before she died, at age 47, after a battle with cancer.^[24] Hussain's work has been on view in exhibitions and art fairs worldwide, including at Tate Modern, in London, National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), in Mumbai, Smart Museum, in Chicago, the 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial, in Brisbane, Australia, and at Talwar Gallery, which represents the estate of the artist.^[25] Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, in Queensland, Australia.

According to curator and scholar Swapnaa Tamhane, Hussain made a distinctive shift from allegorical and figurative paintings to multi-media works in an urgent response to the politics of the day. Being a secular Muslim from a cosmopolitan family with deep political influence, Hussain suddenly found herself being isolated by a discriminating society.^[26] Despite her association with conceptual art, however, Hussain's work remains grounded in the physical using, rather than ignoring, the "sensuousness" of the various materials that make up her installations.^[27] Critics often reference this emphasis on materiality in the discussion of the social, specifically feminist, concerns of much of Hussain's oeuvre which acknowledges female corporeality as its starting point.^[28] Several of her video and performance-based pieces, for example, center on Hussain's own body – a tactic that positions her work at a unique juncture between the political and personal, the public and private. According to art historian Geeta Kapur, Hussain "makes [female and religious identity] matter in a conscious and dialectical way…she not only pitches her identity for display, she [also] constructs a public space for debate."^[29] Hussain's work both establishes an effective relationship with the viewer, and challenges him or her to act.

While Hussain was from a wealthy, educated family, she wanted to represent the voice of lower class Muslims, and did so as she began to work in performance around 1993-1994. She began to question her use of materials like paint and canvas, and wanted intentionally to adopt “domestic” materials found in the home used by women (used by the unaccounted for, unrepresented labour force of domestic servants). Hence, she began to use washing detergents, chopping knives, cloth, or food. Her performances, Living on the Margins (1995), Textured Terrain (1997), Is it what you think? (1998), and In Between (1998), all contain materials that continue from one performance into the other. She wore dancer’s anklets with bells (gungurus), a hair extension (pharandi), and physically embodied a certain sense of movement and the fleeting quality of sound. In particular, she dons a burka, something that she never – nor members of her family – wore in their daily life as modern, educated, cosmopolitan Muslims – and plays with its symbolism, presence, signification, shape, and interrogates its meaning.^[30]

Rummana Hussain's repetition or imagery and recycling of materials presented in non-hierarchical modes of display became part of a language she used to articulate the process of understanding her own identity and position. Her last work, A Space for Healing (1999), was made as a resting place for herself and her nation, for the confusion between retaining tradition and yet embracing a future that negotiates a raging capitalism. She created the symbiotic feeling of both a mosque and a hospital with stretchers laid out resembling prayer mats, and blackened, rusted tools running around the perimeter, that appear to be an Urdu script but in fact communicate nothing. This was a metaphorical 'space for healing', as Hussain died just after finishing the work, and the work was made in thinking conceptually of joining the physical and the spiritual.^[31]

• 1998, Art in General, Residency, New York, NY, US
• 1997, Artspace Studios, Residency, Bristol, UK
• 1996, Ministry of Human Resource Development Senior Fellowship (Visual Arts), New Delhi, India

Rummana was married to Ishaat Hussain, an Indian businessman and former interim chairman of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). They have a daughter, Shazmeen, who married Indian filmmaker Shaad Ali in 2006. The couple divorced in 2011. Shazmeen is currently married to and has a child with Rustom Lawyer.^[2][32]

Rummana died of cancer on 5 July 1999. She was 47.^[2][33]

• Art India, "Look Back in Anger," August 2019
• Artforum, January 2016.
• Flash Art, "In Order to Join CSMVS and Goethe-Institute / Mumbai", April 2015
• Rummana Hussain in the permanent collection of the Queensland Art Gallery.
• Art India, The Courage of Being Rummana, January–April 1999.
• The New York Times, Rummana Hussain, 47, Indian Conceptual Artist, 18 July 1999.
• The New York Times, Rummana Hussain, 23 October 1998.
• The New York Times, Rummana Hussain: In Order to Join, 16 October 1998.