On this day
On 17 October, the Indian art world remembers Lalita Lajmi (also spelled Lalitha Lajmi). She was a painter whosedetermination outlasted decades of being overlooked. Born on 17 October 1932 in Calcutta, she passed away on 13 February 2023 at the age of 90. Over a career of more than sixty years, she built a rich body of work about women, performance and the hidden dramas of everyday life.
Early Life of Lalita Lajmi: A Childhood Steeped in the Arts
Lajmi grew up surrounded by creativity. Her father was a poet, her mother a writer who worked in several languages, and her brother was the celebrated Hindi film director, producer and actor Guru Dutt. As a girl she loved classical dance, but she later explained that her middle-class family could not afford dance lessons.
Her path to painting began with a gift. Her uncle B. B. Benegal, a commercial artist in Kolkata, gave her a box of paints, and she began painting in earnest in the early 1960s, teaching art in a school to support herself.
Lalita Lajmi’s Artistic Journey
Marriage and motherhood came first, but she returned to art with resolve. She showed work in a 1960 Progressive Artists’ Group exhibition at the Artists’ Centre in Bombay, and a year later her mentor K. H. Ara helped her secure her first solo show. As one of few women artists of her generation, she balanced painting with teaching and raising a family.
Lajmi made room for art wherever she could. She set up her first studio in her garage and often worked late into the night. After learning intaglio and etching through government-funded evening classes at Sir J.J. School of Art between 1973 and 1976, she installed a printing press in her kitchen.
Themes and Style in Lalita Lajmi’s Paintings
Her figurative works feature men, women, children and clowns, with “performance” as a recurring idea — not only on stage or in the circus, but in daily life. Her paintings often explore the unspoken tensions between men and women, yet her female figures are assertive and independent rather than meek.
Her early paintings carry a melancholic mood, while later works grow more hopeful, though they remain autobiographical throughout and draw on the world of cinema. By the mid-1980s she was working across etchings, oils and watercolours. She also depicted the natural bond between mother and daughter — fitting, as her daughter Kalpana Lajmi became a filmmaker.
Self-portraiture lay at the heart of her practice. Her work moved from realism toward ideas drawn from Tantrism and the concept of the Bindu, and her sessions with a psychoanalyst shaped a deep engagement with self-portraits.
Honours and International Exhibitions
Lajmi held a Government of India Junior Fellowship from 1979 to 1983 and received ICCR travel grants for exhibitions in East and West Germany in 1983 and for a 1997 show of contemporary Indian women artists in Oakland, California. Her work was exhibited in galleries in Paris, London and Holland.
Serious critical attention arrived only near the end of her life; she died shortly after her first museum survey at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai. In 2024, writer Skye Arundhati Thomas published the first monograph on her art, opening her archive to a new generation.
Lalita Lajmi’s story is one of persistence: a self-taught woman who made art in borrowed spaces and spare hours, and turned private experience into a visual autobiography. On her birth anniversary, her paintings remind us that some of the most honest voices in Indian modern art took decades to be heard.
Sources:
- Lalita Lajmi – Wikipedia
- Lalitha Lajmi – The Indian Portrait
- Lalitha Lajmi – Gallery Art & Soul
- Lalitha Lajmi (Imagine Otherwise) – MIT Press Bookstore
- Lalitha Lajmi – Better Read
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