A senior printmaker and artist, Lalitha Lajmi has never got the recognition she deserves even though her work has been critically appreciated both in India and abroad for decades. She’s better known for her appearance in the 2007 film Taare Zameen Par , and for her familial relationships — her brother and daughter were Bollywood directors Guru Dutt and Kalpana Lajmi. But over the past several decades of being a caregiver and teacher, Lajmi has stubbornly continued to learn and make art and teach others, becoming a source of inspiration in her own right.
She has nurtured her creativity during the pandemic as well, creating art with the material at hand. The result is two 21 ft. long Japanese scrolls drawn with stories of family, ageing, bonding, relationships, birds, flowers and hybrid animals with pencil, watercolour and crayon. The scroll had developed a sepia tint lying in its tube and Lajmi uses this shade as a base for her monochromes.
Curious and restless
Scroll 2 that looks at relationships between mother and child, siblings, birds, flowers and hybrid animals will be on view in Mumbai next month. Lajmi is still working on Scroll 1 which shows life in the womb. “The thought was that I would start with the beginning of life because creativity begins in the womb. When I worked
‘Memory Roll 5’
with watercolours, I did a series on the psyche of the child,” she says. “These scrolls were not for an exhibition. This was for myself. During the lockdown, I wondered initially what I would do because I’d already done etchings, watercolours and oils. So I thought I would try to draw in pencil. I used to work in oil earlier but you need daylight for oils and I had no time during the day earlier. I’ve got daylight now but I’m already done with those mediums.”
This curiosity, restlessness and desire to explore are expressed in all of Lajmi’s work. A self-taught artist, her first painting was at the age of five when her uncle bought her a box of paints. She went on to win the first prize in a competition. At 17, she got married to a Merchant Navy sailor, Gopi Lajmi, who told her at their first meeting that he wasn’t interested in art. This came as a blow to Lajmi, but she wasn’t allowed to call off the wedding. Her daughter Kalpana was born when Lajmi was just 20. With a husband away on work a lot and a huge house to manage, the shy young woman soon found herself bound by domesticity.
Reflections of the self
However, Lajmi was surrounded by artists, including her brother Guru Dutt and sister-in-law Geeta
Man and Woman
Dutt, the well-known singer. But it was her cousin, adman and director Shyam Benegal, and artist K.H. Ara who were her biggest supporters. Ara, her mentor, included her in an exhibition by the Progressive Artists Group in 1960 at the Artist’s Centre in Mumbai and arranged her first show at the Jehangir Art Gallery in 1961. She sold her first painting, even before the exhibition, to Dr. Heinzmode, a German collector working at Shantiniketan, and at the same price that Ara charged.
Her first exhibitions were sold out but not the ones after that. So she took up a job teaching art to school children while continuing her studies alongside. “When at my job, I decided I was not going to compromise on my painting,” she says.
Then, her beloved brother Guru Dutt passed away, followed by her mother and husband. A neighbour encouraged the traumatised Lajmi to go to a psychoanalyst. “The doctor was young and when I told him I couldn’t afford his sessions, he said I could pay him when I earned.” The sessions proved fruitful, helping Lajmi understand her dreams and herself better. It had a tremendous influence on her art.
Hidden tensions
Lajmi was invited by the director of the Prince of Wales Museum (now, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya) in Mumbai to read up on iconography at their library since she was interested in Tantrism and the bindu . So, when her younger son went to school, she would catch a bus to the museum and read for two hours every day.
From 1973 to 1976, she attended evening
Woman with Mask
classes for intaglio and etching printmaking at the Sir J.J. School of Art, setting up a graphic press in her kitchen to work on at night, sleeping for only a couple of hours. These prints would travel to West and East Germany in 1983 for an exhibition supported by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. This portfolio, ‘The Mind’s Cupboards’, narrated the story of early Indian feminism.
While Lajmi doesn’t like repeating herself in her work, there are a few major recurring themes such as masks, clowns, human relationships, loneliness and sexual intimacy. The hidden tensions between men and women are rendered lifelike in her arresting portraits.
Her women are not meek but assertive and aggressive. “Perhaps that’s why she likes painting,” says fellow artist Anjana Mehra. “For her, life has always been difficult and that’s why she seeks out paintings and drawing because it’ll do what you tell it to do. It’s a surface that can’t react to you so you can put in whatever you want.” Lajmi’s motto has always been to “go to the recesses of the mind and develop imagination to come to terms with your work and life”.
This honesty, curiosity and stubbornness to create have kept her interested in new techniques and materials even at the cost of her health — the constant bending over a table while drawing and painting has given her sciatica, she says. It’s this perseverance that makes her continue with a project that she herself admits will probably never find a buyer because “a 21ft scroll will be impossible to sell to a collector since it won’t be easy to display. So, it may need to go to a museum,” says Lajmi, and shrugs. An artist’s sole purpose, after all, is creation.
The writer is the author of the Weapons of Kalki series and interested in South Asian art .
