Lalitha Lajmi (1932-2023): Heart and Soul

THE ARTIST LALITHA Lajmi, who died a few days ago at the age of 90, was counted among India’s most prominent post-Independence artists, although she did not always get the recognition bestowed upon her peers. Her works narrated “the history of the Indian woman in the de­cades that followed Independence”, as the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), which had begun a retrospective of her work last month, put it.

Born in Calcutta in 1932 into a family involved in the arts—her father was a poet, her mother a writer, and two of her brothers (the legendary Guru Dutt and Atma Ram) went on to have successful film careers—Lajmi began to paint at the age of five when an uncle, the commercial artist BB Benegal, gifted her a box of paints. She continued to paint right through to the end of her life, despite the demands of running a house (she was married at the age of 17), a career as a schoolteacher, poor early sales of her work, and the many personal tragedies that beset her life.

One of her earliest champions was the modernist KH Ara. Encouraging her as an artist, he included her works in an exhibition by the famed Progressive Artists Group in 1960 and later helped organise her first show at the Jehangir Art Gallery in 1961. But despite the success of her early shows, they did not always translate into sales. And Lajmi, who did not want to depend on her husband’s income, began a long career teaching art at a school. She would also take private tuition during weekends. But all through this period, she kept on with her own painting.

Her early works, in her view, lacked focus and direction. This changed however in the mid-1970s and 1980s. A personal crisis was unfolding in her life then. The death of her brother Dutt, then of her sister-in-law Geeta Dutt, whom she was close to, and the later deaths of her mother and husband, plunged her into a deep depression. Talking about Dutt’s suicide in an interview, she said, “It was a huge trauma for all of us, especially my mother and me. I couldn’t sleep for nights together.” She began to take counselling in the 1980s, but these sessions didn’t just help her cope with her loss. It also gave a new shape to her art. “My work had no sense of direction then. I felt I had to evolve. The psychoanalysis helped me introspect and work on my skills,” she once revealed in an interview. The abstract paintings of her early career now gave way to etchings, oils, and water colours. She also got into printmaking around this time. She would attend evening classes for intaglio and etching printmaking at Mumbai’s Sir JJ School of Art, and would work at a graphic press she had set up in her kitchen in the nights, catching up on a couple of hours of sleep, before her duties as a mother and teacher resumed next morning.

Although Lajmi didn’t like to repeat herself in her work, there were a few major recurring themes. In her later works of the late-’80s and early-’90s, for instance, many have observed what they call a reflection of hidden tensions that exist between men and women. Another was the concept of performance, not just of actors on stage but also of people in life. In her interviews, she said this might have something to do with the influence of her brother Guru Dutt. She also depicted the relationships between women, especially mothers and daughters, perhaps drawing from her own relationship with her daughter, the filmmaker Kalpana Lajmi, whose relationship with a much senior man (the singer Bhupen Hazarika) and later her death brought her much grief.

She continued to work throughout her life and handling large canvases and frames became exhausting. She kept at it through the pandemic, exhibiting an experimental series where she had sketched portraits of women, birds with human heads, and other shapes on a 21-foot long Japanese scroll in 2021. Many critics have found that her works were melancholic in nature. But this changed in later years. In her interviews, she describes her works as having acquired a more optimistic quality. “I always said that I wanted to become an artist. That is what keeps me going till today. Until my last breath, I want to work on my paintings,” she said in an interview.

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Lhendup G Bhutia

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