Lalitha Lajmi (1932 - 2023)

Watercolour on Paper

22 x 14 Inches

Signed & Dated Lower Right

Year: 2014

Performance was one of the enduring subjects of Lalitha Lajmi’s art. Throughout her career, the stage and the mask became recurring sites of enquiry — spaces where emotion, restraint, and play converged. Lajmi began working in watercolour much later in life, translating the emotional charge of her earlier oils and etchings into a more translucent, meditative form.

In this delicate composition, an acrobat lifts a partner above a chequered floor, watched over by silent figures and animals. The scene, poised between theatre and dream, carries the quiet humour and introspection that define her late works.

Her fascination with performance ran deep. As a child in Calcutta, she watched the all-night Jatra plays — vivid tableaux of song, movement, and moral drama — that later found echoes in her own visual theatre. Decades later, her daughter Kalpana’s involvement in dramatics and the cinematic legacy of her brother Guru Dutt shaped her understanding of what she called “the world of pretend.”

The graphite study on the verso reveals her disciplined working process—an intuitive sketch developed directly on the same sheet before the final composition was realised in colour. Painted in her Lokhandwala studio, often at night, works from this period reflect the artist’s lifelong fascination with the fragile balance between illusion and truth. 

Exhibited:  The Mind's Cupboard - A Retrospective of Lalitha Lajmi, 2023. NGMA, Mumbai 

Provenance: The Artist's Estate