Lalitha Lajmi
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A backgrounder
Alaka Sahani, February 16, 2023: The Indian Express
YEARS ago, artist Lalitha Lajmi, then a mother of two with a day job as a school teacher, could devote time to creating art only at night, once their household quietened down. With the night light being unreliable, she found it tough to pursue oil painting. She leaned towards printmaking and etching instead. Years later, her plans of exploring oil painting were scuttled again. Due to the pandemic, she could not go to her garage-turned-studio in her Andheri building.
This time around, Lajmi found two rolls of old semi-opaque rice paper, which were lying at home, and drew her artistic impressions about family, relationships and nature on them, in grisaille and sepia. Titled Memory Rolls, they iterate her life-long propensity for combining autobiographical elements with imaginary. They are showcased at the ongoing retrospective of her work — “The Mind’s Cupboard” — at National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai, which was inaugurated on January 12.
A month after the opening, Lajmi passed away due to age-related ailments at the age of 90. Till the end of her life, she overcame multiple adversities — from financial constraints and personal tragedies to the pandemic-induced restrictions — to pursue art.
Lajmi was born in Kolkata to a poet father and a poly-linguist mother in 1932. The family later moved to Mumbai where her older brother Guru Dutt found success as a filmmaker par excellence. Though she had shown artistic flair when young, her ambition took a backseat when she got married to a merchant navy sailor, Gopi Lajmi, at the age of 17. After the birth of her daughter Kalpana and son Devdas, she eventually veered towards art.
Being part of an exhibition held by the Progressive Artists Group in 1960 gave Lajmi the encouragement she needed to follow her passion. She found support in KH Ara, her mentor, and a solo exhibition followed a year later. She attended evening classes in intaglio and etching through a government-funded programme, at the Sir JJ School of Art from 1973 to ’76. It prompted her to set up a press in her kitchen. “I used the grant I had received from the Ministry of Culture to buy a printer,” recalled Lajmi, while speaking to us earlier about the retrospective. It was her long-cherished dream to hold the retrospective and she was upset when the pandemic delayed it. Though Lajmi was surrounded by creative personalities — brother Guru Dutt, sister-in-law Geeta Dutt, cousin Shyam Benegal, and her daughter Kalpana — it was not easy for her to pursue art full-time. “I practised printmaking after everyone went to sleep. For over two decades, I didn’t sleep properly as I tried to balance my teaching job with making art,” recalled Lajmi. Curator of her retrospective Sumesh Sharma says Lajmi was one of the few women printmakers of her generation that is defined by Zarina Hashmi, Anupam Sud and her. Interestingly, “all three women have lent their personal lives as the subject for their etchings,” adds Sharma.
Lajmi’s first solo show featured landscapes, still-lifes, nude studies in pastels and some oils. “I am not a trained artist. Therefore, there was no sense of direction in my work. It took me around two decades to find my own expression. Just like it is in other creative fields, be it literature or cinema, artists, too, require time to come into their own,” said the artist, who explored themes of family, death, masks and realism in her work. What Sharma finds impressive about Lajmi’s art, over the years, is that it has remained “consistent”.
Describing her work as “autobiographical”, Sharma says, “Lalitha has battled loneliness all her life and the emotion has authored her prints.” In his 1986-essay The Family, poet Adil Jussawalla writes that “family” had become a major theme for Lajmi. He wrote: “If the paintings are based on memories of a particular family, the memories have not been used to liberate the painter. It is as though Lajmi were determined to go on reliving those memories, moment by unfaked moment.”
In the essay Rooms Unlocked by Views, Lalitha Lajmi: Prints 1985–1995, art critic Ranjit Hoskote writes, “Since her first exhibition in 1961, she has achieved fluency and depth of insight in various media: oils, watercolours, graphics. In each treatment, she explores the mechanics of human alienation, control of resistance; she testifies to the claustrophobic politics of the family, to the damaging conjugations in which the female self is construed by its relations to others.”
There is an overwhelming bleakness in her work that probably stems from the loneliness and untimely loss of those close to her — her brother, sister-in-law, husband and daughter. Lajmi’s loneliness intensified after the demise of Kalpana — who appears in a number of her paintings — in 2018. “How does one cope with loneliness? I miss my family. Many of our family members are living away,” said the artist. She also missed gallery hopping and other cultural activities that she was accustomed to while living in south Mumbai for 40 years before she shifted to the suburbs. However, her evenings were mostly dedicated to listening to songs by Geeta Dutt or those from her brother’s movies. The retrospective is a celebration of the tireless and resolute artist’s impressive body of work. This is also a step towards looking at her achievements beyond her charming cameo as the painting competition’s judge in Taare Zameen Par (2008) and reinforcing her identity as one of independent India’s greats.
