Lalitha Lajmi (1932 - 2023)

Oil on Canvas

42 x 42 Inches

Year - 1999

Throughout her career, Lalitha Lajmi returned repeatedly to the intertwined motifs of death and the mask. These symbols first appeared in her etchings of the 1970s — works such as Death Reading a Book of Poems — and later re-emerged in her large oil paintings, including Death Also Has a Mask (1999).

The mask, for Lajmi, was never decorative. It entered her work through her daughter, filmmaker Kalpana Lajmi, whose involvement in theatre deeply influenced her mother’s imagery. “The concept of masks came to me because of my daughter Kalpana… My masks were humane, with feelings and emotions, unlike the decorative kind which I do not like,” she once said.

During the mid-1970s, a phase that also marked her years in psychoanalysis, Lajmi began translating dreams and subconscious imagery into her art. This process continued through the following decades, shaping her mature style in oils and watercolours.

Death Also Has a Mask unites these strands — life, performance, and the subconscious — into a single, haunting image. A woman holds a mask beside a skull, observed by shadowed figures and a white dog. The scene unfolds not as despair but as recognition: death itself becomes part of life’s performance, another role on the stage she had long painted.

Having witnessed the deaths of her brother Guru Dutt, her husband, and later her daughter Kalpana, Lajmi’s reflections on mortality were shaped by lived experience. Yet even in confronting loss, her paintings retained composure and empathy — an artist’s quiet acceptance that, as she once said, “the masks had disappeared, and now they were within.” 

Published: Skye Arundhati - Thomas, Lalitha Lajmi, Imagine Otherwise, Sternberg Press, 2025

Provenance - The Artist's Estate