Imagine Otherwise Lalitha Lajmi

The first critical biography on Lalitha Lajmi's distinct form of autoethnographic painting fueled by psychoanalysis. Lalitha Lajmi was born in 1932 in Kolkata, India and died in India on 13 February 2023 soon after her first museum survey exhibition at The National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai. Born into a family with a keen interest in the creative arts and cinema, Lalitha Lajmi’s fervor for the creative arts would be limited by her lived circumstance, and acknowledgment would not begin to materialize until at the very end of her life. A single mother, Lajmi set up her first studio in the garage area of her home, working on her multivalent practice—primarily through painting—long into night. Her initial investigations began with realism moved into expressions of Tantrism and the concept of the Bindu. In this, the first critical volume and biography on the artist by Skye Arundhati-Thomas, the author delves into the artist’s archives, papers, letters, and sketchbooks in pursuit of clues to the artist’s character. Arundhati-Thomas reveals the critical role that psychoanalysis played in the evolution of Lalitha Lajmi’s art into the realm of the conceptual, and specifically, a distinctly situated form of autoethnography. Studying her concerted relationship with her psychoanalyst, the author reveals how these sessions fueled a practice of self-portraiture that formed the bedrock of the artist’s practice long through and to the end of her life. Published by Sternberg Press in collaboration with artPost21