Rumanna Hussain (1952–99)
A look into the life of the first conceptual artist in India
“Where does she belong? Is she behind a veil? Have you defined her? Does she go into her shell? Have you pushed her? What does the press say? Do social conditions alter her behaviour? Does she wash herself? Is it a prerequisite? Where does she wash? Does she have breasts? Or has she had a mastectomy? Does she have kinky sex? Does she cover her body and wear transparent clothes? Have you defined her? Has she fought battles? Have they been forgotten? Has she joined a revolution?”
Rummana Hussain wore a black veil as she read these words out from a book wrapped like the Holy Quran nestled in her lap as she sat on a chair dressed in a black lace underwear, a parandi hanging from her false plait, her bare breasts revealing scars of a mastectomy. This excerpt from the monologue that was part of Hussain’s 1985 performance ‘Is It What You Think?’ in which she created entered into dialogue with Sufi poems, the issue of the relations between Muslims and Hindus in India, as self-portraits of women protestors were projected on to her body. The performance was definitive of her personality and artist practice, the nexus of politics, activism, religious identity, class, sexuality, and her female position.
Early Life
Rummana was born to a politically active and culturally affluent family in Lucknow. Her mother, Hamida Habibullah, had been the Minister of Uttar Pradesh, a member of parliament and the All India Congress, amongst many positions she held. Her father, General Enaith Habibullah, was a strong leftist whose family moved to Pakistan during the Partition, but he was in the Indian Army and remained loyal to India and went on to establish the National Defence Academy in Pune post-1947. With different political leanings and strong opposing cooking, theirs was a tense household but one that shaped Rummana’s understanding of politics and helped appreciate the idea of the freedom of thought and speech.
She studied Fine Art in Ravensborne College of Art, Bromley, Kent, England, and after she graduated in 1974, she returned to India to marry a businessman named Ishaat Hussain. They settled in Mumbai and soon had their first child together, Shazmeen, but Rummana’s progressive and feminist views were proving to be a stark contrast to her partner’s personality. Ishaat, who worked for the major Indian corporation TATA, was soon transferred to the eastern state of Bihar in the early 1980s, while Hussain chose to move to Delhi, where she began a four-year stint at the Garhi Studios, an artists’ facility supported by the state-run Lalit Kala Akademi.
In Delhi, she built friendships with other artists such as the painter Manjit Bawa, sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee and fellow artist feminist Navjot Altaf. Her art practice at the time leaned heavily towards figuration, probably influenced by the trends among the “Baroda school” painters”, but also wanted her to art to be accessible to people of all classes and felt figuration allowed work “transparency”. Fellow artists like Altaf rebuked her for her weak use of figuration, and she admitted her struggle in finding the exact visual language which with she could articulate her emotions.
Rummana and SAHMAT
Around this time, the unprecedented rise of the Hindu right in the 1970s and 1980s had given way to a growing culture of communal unrest. Certain events that occurred during this period proved to have a deep and irrevocable impact on Hussain, her personal life and eventually her entire artistic practice. The first event was the brutal and public killing of activist, poet and playwright Safdar Hashmi in Sahibabad in Uttar Pradesh, January 1989, which sent ripples through the entire creative and activist community in India. Then in 1990, two Hindu men stabbed her first cousin in Hyderabad after his evening prayers at a mosque across his house.
Rummana joined a group of artists, writers and curators — helmed by Ram Rahman, Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram, who formed the Sahmat Collective, a project meant to promote secularism and pluralism through the arts. Sahmat actively mounted exhibitions and organized rallies and “protest performances” across India, with the most notable campaign being “Artists Against Communalism” in 1991. Rummana had moved to Mumbai by this time, and became a key local coordinator for Sahmat’s programmes in Mumbai, and organized many events including an exhibition with taxi-drivers who painted slogans of communal harmony on their vehicles, a concert in Shivaji Park, and mural paintings on public walls in which stalwarts like M.F. Hussain took part too. At a time when things continued getting politically very heated, the entire artist community had come together to fight for secularism.
The communal tension came to a climax in the December of 1992 when a group of militant Hindus attacked and demolished the 16th-century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, an area said to be the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, in an attempt to reclaim the disputed site. (rephrase, cite) The destruction led to months of savage, communal riots across several cities in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — Mumbai was among the worst affected cities — and the death of more than 2,000 people.
In response to this, Sahmat organized a festival of Sufi bhakt music called Anhad Karje in Delhi just a few weeks later on Jan 1, 1993. The event was a 17-hour performance, which meant to promote tolerance, spirituality and harmony between religions at a very tumultuous political time. Apart from Sufi music, the event hosted academic lectures all meant to uphold India’s secular traditons, including one by Professor Irfan Habib Kabir and Mono-theism. This evening had a very big impact on Rummana, and writing in India’s Independent newspaper the following month, Hussain said, “Historically…artists have always maintained the secular tradition. It’s necessary to emerge from our insular shells, to come together and try and develop symbols of secularism. Moreover, the coming together of artists and viewers is a form of public participation, one that emphasizes the commonality of it all, something which the Sufi-Bhakti tradition emphasizes.”
The Babri Masjid demolition and the subsequent riots that followed in Mumbai had a deeply personal impact on Rummana. She was suddenly made to feel very aware and vulnerable of her Muslim identity as her family had to leave their building, Somerset House, in Colaba and remove their nameplate outside their building and shift into a hotel for hiding. She had grown up in a very secular home, and had never wore a burka or chador in her daily life. According to her close friend and fellow Sahmat artist Ram Rahman, it was like this identity had been thrust upon her and it disturbed her deeply, and attributed this troubled time to the profound change that was to occur in her artistic practice. “She was one artist, whose practice was completely transformed by that event, so deeply and so sharply in such a small amount of time”, said Ram Rahman.
Frustrated with the limitations of figuration, she stopped sketching and painting, and instead began to work with material objects and signs instead as she tried to urgently formulate a more feminist and conceptual vocabulary. Faced with a constraint of time as she completed her Fine Arts course in the University of Calcutta whilst taking care of her young daughter, she first turned to domestic materials. In a 1994 interview, she explained why.
“I was getting more and more interested in domestic materials which are related to a woman’s everyday experience. Things that are around every day. Things that are used by the people working in my house. I am also a woman who spends a lot of time in my house — in my body. The house is a body.”
These materials included robin blue — a chemical agent used to whiten clothes, indigo — the natural dye, terracotta dust or geru — powdered reddish-brown earth clay, which gave rise to works such as a Series called “Crushed Blue” (1992) and Fragment from Splitting (1993). While the use of robin blue was special in how it brought domesticity into the fine art space, the use of indigo could also possibly signal a reference to the anti-colonial moment in 1859 with the peasant-lead Indigo Revolts in Bengal.
The idea of using of terracotta pots, as well as pigment, might have possibly come during a poetry reading at Anhad Garje, as Rahman remembers how Rummana was very moved by a reading of a poem by Kabir which marvelled at how the earthen the pot contained the universe, and everything is in the clay pot and you have to look within to find the universe. “She started making these sculptural objects with smashed pots, so the jump in her practice was sharp”, he said.
In continuation of her experimentation with materials and the politics of the female body, in 1995 she invited art veterans Navtoj Altaf and her daughter Sasha, Nancy Adajania, Shireen Gandhy, Shakuntala Kulkarni and a handful of others, to participate in her first performance art piece, Living on the Margins (1995) at NCPA Mumbai. The performance took place in an outdoor garden, and saw Hussain move around scattering blue powder (robin blue) as well as a red powder (terracotta dust), and takes a series of circumambulations around the square, carrying the head of a vacuum cleaner or a papaya sliced in half. Every few steps, she would stop and opens her mouth to emit a sound either like a prayer or a scream.
Still a student at the time, Sasha Altaf described the how impactful the piece was, and said “It explored the public and the private, the self and the other. Hussain was questioning her identity as well as discovering the feminine.” Considered as one of the first contemporary works in India to use ‘performance’ as a medium, it was one of many performances that Hussain would go on to create.
After the Babri Masjid demolition, another event that had a huge impact on Rummana was the discovery of her maid’s illness. “When I visited Rummana in Somerset House, she told me about her maid who used to cook for her”, recalls Rahman. “She told me that the maid’s husband had died, that he had had this slow disease and had wasted away…And that the maid was very ill and the mother of the maid was hiding this illness, or wouldn’t let her take them to a proper doctor”. She proceeded to tell him that she had noticed a strange white infection in the maid’s mouth, and Ram immediately understood. “Rummana, that’s AIDS” he remembers telling her, as he had just returned from New York where he had witnessed the whole first wave of people dying of the AIDS epidemic in the 90s and understood that the white infection was thrush, a symptom of an advanced AIDS infection that was an infection in the mouth. Rummana was taken aback and saddened at the thought that her maid could not trust her and instead hid the illness with the fear that she might love her job and livelihood. Indu, her cook, was barely 20 when she eventually died, and despite of Hussain’s insistence, she refused to see a doctor in her last days.
This was especially disturbing to Rummana as it was around the same time that she discovered her own illness, breast cancer.
She paid homage to Indu in her (1996) work Home/Nation , in which drew a parallel between Indu’s tragedy with that of the nation. She created a multi-object installation that comprised of a large scall photo of the tomb of a long forgotten Sufi, located near the Babri Masjid in Ayodhaya that had escaped Hindutva destruction. On either side of this large image, she hung six boards, which held positive photo strips featuring hands making chappatis, chopping vegetables, and cleaning pots, along with a text on the wall describing Indu’s life. On the floor infront of the photographs, lay a six feet tall mound of rice on which were placed eight small terracotta oil lamps containing the wisps of wicks that had burned down to white ash.
Veteran artist Vivan Sundaram remarked that with her fluid use of materials in a fluid manner she was able to integrate the emotional and personal into social and historical frameworks. “Her work actually belongs to that moment in the early 90s which signals the shift from conventional painting and sculpture to more radical political content and form.”
In the latter half of 1990, Hussain spent a lot of time in New York as part of a residency in Art in General in Manhattan, and forged friendships with other female artists like Jamelie Hassan and Zarina Hashmi. As she was becoming increasingly more exposed to feminist art, she was deeply inspired by the performance work of Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic.
By now her cancer had spread, and she was being treated in Sloan Memorial Kettering Cancer Center, New York. Her health was deteriorating fast, but her spirit was more than intact.
“On 31st october 1998, I had one one of my last big halloween parties, which were quite famous in NY, in my big loft.”, recalls Ram Rahman who lived in New York at the time. “Rummana was very ill by that October, and had put on quite a bit of weight because of the drugs. It was a four floor walk up, and I told her that I would carry her up the stairs, and she started squealing like a teenager again, giggling and screaming. And I did do that, I carried her up the stairs”
She continued to channel the trauma her body went through in her work, and as part of her show ‘In Order to Join’ created a video that was about her treatment at the hospital, with images of her in the room with intra-veinous feeds, drugs being fed into her veins, into her body, interspersed with images of Mumbai Central train station, a South Asian vendor at a New York subway station and the mundane and repetitive action of vegetables being rapidly chopped in a friend’s kitchen in Queens, all centering on her both her life and identity were in a flux.
The most striking section of the video was a shot of her walking across the bridge from Manhattan to the Indian section of Queens while wearing ghungroos and a parandi on her hair, which had she had lost most of due to chemotherapy.
“The first “artist in residence” from India at Art in General, Rummana also became the “artist in the hospital”, wrote Toronto artist Jamelie Hassan in an article titled “Tribute to Rummana”.
Less than a year later, Hussain was to succumb to her illness.
Hussain passed away in 1999, just at the precipice of the Indian contemporary market’s international boom. But she left behind a valuable legacy as one of India’s first performance artists especially one who brought attention to the social condition of women through the use of the body. She is also considered to be one of the early Indian conceptual, unique in her use of materials in ways that interpreted and explored their national, political, historical and feminist connotations. She has had a profound influence on a generation of cultural practitioners such as the curator Sasha Altaf, gallerists Shireen Gandhy, artist Shilpa Gupta, all of whom worked closely with Hussain. Her work is has been called predictive by some, as a lot of elements and methodologies she employed were seen in other contemporary artists years later, as in the work of Shilpa Gupta who asked female friends to stain pieces of cloth with menstrual blood for one a piece she created in 2000. Hussain is periodically cited by practitioners, curators, and critics, but most of the younger generation has not seen her work because it so hard to find. Either it has not survived or its archives have not been made accessible, hence there is a risk her practice not being included in the current art history discourse of contemporary art. But there some of it is being published and shown, such as her solo show ‘Breaking Skin’ held by Talwar Gallery in 2014 , and the ambitious group show ‘In Order to Join’ that was an homage to Hussain by Indo-Canadian curator Swapna Tamhane who has been focusing her research on Hussain’s work for years now.
