Sacred/Secular: Rummana Hussain's Politics of Signification

In her relatively brief career, Rummana Hussain (1952-1999) straddled painting, drawing, performance, video, and installation, turning to the latter three in the mid-nineties following the 1992 demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by a right-wing Hindu mob and the horrific rioting that ensued in Bombay (and other cities). As an upper-class Muslim woman with a secular, leftist upbringing, Hussain’s religious identity was suddenly and violently foregrounded in an increasingly polarized and hostile polity. Her cancer diagnosis in 1995 created a different kind of awareness of her body’s fragility and vulnerability, lending greater urgency to the interrogation of such problematics in her artistic practice during the final years of her life. This paper focuses on two significant late works – 'Is it what you think?' (1998) and 'A Space for Healing' (1999) – which explicitly employ signifiers of religious (Muslim) identity and tropes of sacred spaces. Hussain foregrounds questions of representation and perception, loss, and the possibility of recuperation while seeking an affective engagement with the viewer through direct address and sensory immersion. Moving away from both narrative and abstract forms of painting and sculpture, which had dominated her practice from the mid-80s to mid-90s, these works build on the tension between spiritual signification and secular critique that became the prerogative of an elite, culturally Muslim artist in metropolitan India at the turn-of-the-century, drawing on the critical and cosmopolitan legacies of feminism and postmodernism.