A dramatic change in an artist’s work can tempt us to search for a single turning point. In his CSAS Fall Friday Lecture Series presentation on Rummana Hussain, Rattanamol Singh Johal asks what happens when we resist that impulse.
Hussain’s work is often discussed only in response to the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid and the violence that followed in cities across India, particularly Bombay, where she was living at the time. Johal, while not discounting the importance of that moment, complicates the idea of reading her practice through the lens of a single event.
By focusing on her paintings from late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as her experiments – in the early 90s – with paper, xerography, powdered pigments and a range of sculptural materials, a more complex account emerges of the entanglements between her formal and political commitments. The events of the early 1990s gave those explorations a new urgency.
This longer view reveals continuities that can be obscured when Hussain’s practice is periodized neatly into a before and after-Babri. Johal points to her sustained interest in women’s experiences, class, labor, and a feminist questioning of established binaries. The talk situated Hussain’s concerns within critical postmodernist and feminist discourses in India and internationally during the 1980s and 1990s.
Hussain’s earlier paintings were emphatically figurative, and by reading them allegorically, Johal connects them to the legacy of politically charged narrative painting associated with what is known as the “Baroda school.” Close reading also reveals how Hussain came to confront the limits of painting, both in terms of what she could accomplish narratively and allegorically on canvas or paper, but also the audiences that painting could reach. That question of publics became increasingly important to the artist.
Johal describes the Bombay art world of the period as relatively cloistered, limited to a couple of private galleries and the relatively more accessible Jehangir Art Gallery, which artists could reserve for a weeklong staging of their own exhibitions. Hussain’s engagement with broader publics and forms of display was catalyzed, in part, by her involvement with SAHMAT (the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust), which staged exhibitions, protests and performances in prominent public spaces.
Her 1996 installation work Home/Nation attests to this changing relationship between viewer and artwork. Rather than confronting single images, exhibition visitors encounter a sequence of objects, texts, and pictures in space, and try to make sense of them collectively. The installation also pulls in multiple threads from the artist’s practice in the preceding years, including the plight of her domestic help and the impact of her own minoritization.
Hussain’s use of language similarly changed the relationship between artwork and viewer. Johal emphasizes that she did not introduce text simply to explain an image. Instead, text often worked to challenge what viewers believed they were seeing. In the performance-based photo-text work Is it what you think? (1998) Hussain presents images of her own body, photographed in various stages of draping and reveal using a black chador, alongside a series of questions that directly confront the assumptions viewers may already have formed about the imaged subject. She provokes a different kind of reading.
Hussain frequently used her own body in her performances, sometimes collaborating with others, but never absenting herself. Johal describes this as putting her body and identity “on the line.” Hussain came from a prominent Muslim family with deep investments in the secular, democratic nation building project post-independence. In the political and social climate in which she found herself working in the 1990s, performance and installation offered strategies to confront stereotypes and essentialisms surrounding various identity categories.
These questions also appear in Hussain’s later room-sized installations The Tomb of Begum Hazrat Mahal (1997) and A Space for Healing (1999). In these works, among other elements, she used everyday implements that included rusted knives and scissors collected from a Bombay junk market to construct forms resembling Perso-Arabic script on the gallery walls. For viewers who don’t read Urdu, Farsi or Arabic, the arrangement could appear to contain a quotation or message. But accustomed readers would recognize quickly that these calligraphic forms do not actually produce legible language. Johal sees that ambiguity as significant: Hussain uses the appearance of script to challenge the immediate association of a certain script with a particular group.
The constitutive material elements also traveled between works. Johal explained that Hussain reused the same implements from The Tomb of Begum Hazrat Mahal in A Space for Healing, effectively dismantling one work in the process of creating another. That reuse underscores the iterative nature of her practice, in which works were not necessarily conceived as permanent or fixed objects destined for a museum collection.
Hussain died at 47, leaving behind, as Johal describes, hints of future directions in her practice whose outcomes can never be known. Her work has remained in relative obscurity relative to her peers, and her contribution to South Asian art history is still in the process of being written. But there is a larger art-historical question at stake as well. Johal argues that feminist artists working in South Asia during the 1980s and 1990s were deeply engaged in transnational dialogues. Hussain’s practice, in his view, is part of that global feminist art history, and it is equally important to place Hussain within that larger, unfinished conversation.
