Galerie Anne Barrault

Skye Arundhati Thomas is an Indian writer, editor and curator.
Her work focuses on contemporary politics, culture and the multiple histories of South Asia. Her first book, Remember the Details, about viral images, courtrooms and the brief history of a protest movement, was published by Floating Opera Press. Pleasure Gardens, her second book, co-written with Izabella Scott, deals with constitutional law, military occupation and communication blackouts; it will be published by Mack Books in 2024, as will her third book, devoted to the painter Lalitha Lajmi, by Imagining Otherwise, Sternberg Press. Her latest project as co-editor of The White Review is an anthology of new writing in translation, to be published in spring 2024 by Fitzcarraldo Editions. 

The Anne Barrault Gallery is very pleased to present Lalitha Lajmi’s (1932-2023) first solo exhibition in France. In 2023, a retrospective dedicated to her was held at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai.

Lalitha Lajmi made herself the subject of her own work for nearly six decades. Her face is immediately identifiable in her self-portraiture, repeated tirelessly across hundreds of artworks: sleek and moonlike, chin angled upward, gaping, heavy-lidded eyes. Her body leaps from one painting to the next, sometimes surveying the scene, other times orchestrating it, always with the same self-aware smirk, her mouth pitched to one side. Her likeness is symbolic and archetypal, and she fastidiously reconstructs herself. Sometimes riding a unicycle, arms aloft, juggling orbs. Dancing, buoyant against blurry, uncanny landscapes. Standing at the front of the frame, palms open, a benevolent maestro.

She taught herself how to paint, etch, and make prints; she was productive, dedicated, and meticulous. Lajmi’s fixation on representing the self was, in fact, a national preoccupation during her time. She was a teenager when India was first formed as a republic independent from the British Empire. She was a young adult making art during a time of post-independence euphoria, when the project of Indian decolonization was underway. And there was work to be done. Mythologies had to be built, the nation-state given a new identity. The task at hand—taken up by politicians, historians, artists, writers, and filmmakers alike-was to fashion India a selfhood.

Lajmi’s artist contemporaries were actively recruited for the task—public commissions, murals, and photo-ops with politicians. The first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, enamored with European modernisms, flew in Le Corbusier to design a new city made of plump slabs of concrete. A group of raffish young men who called themselves the Bombay Progressive Artists were the stars of a new Indian modernism. Some painted idyllic village scenes with a wistful romanticism; others worked in abstraction, with oblique shapes representative of Indian traditions and histories. Feminine bodies appeared in modernists’ works as stylized nudes or as bodies of labor: farming, tending to domestic work. But Lajmi painted herself.

Lajmi began undergoing psychoanalysis in her thirties, and she obsessively wrote down her dreams. She was plainspoken about her interest in analysis; it was not just a matter of self-introspection but one of pursuing the addition of surreal interpretation onto her painterly plane. “It is natural for me to examine my dreams for shaping my images,” she said matter-of-factly in an interview with the Sunday Times in 1993. Psychoanalysis offered Lajmi a set of tools by which to dissolve the slim separation between reality and fiction, both in waking and sleeping life. It was in her watercolors, especially, that she worked through the materials of her dreams; the soft, slippery nature of the medium allowed her to be ambiguous and free flowing. “Dreams clarify things… longings are expressed,” she said.

Lajmi’s art offers a rich profusion of her inner world. The material produced by the psychoanalytic method is, by nature, elusive: recounting dreams that are fleeting in spirit; admitting to the desires and impulses forbidden by normative society; or trying to identify motivations so disguised we remain blind to them. In her dream journals, Lajmi writes lucidly about the knottiness of her dream life. She is obsessive, and even hubristic, and like with her painting, she plunders the recurrence of certain paranoias and yearnings. Of these, her sharpest glance is at the loneliness produced by the modern family unit; Lajmi herself had an arranged marriage.

Lajmi’s work is not just a reflection of her inner world but also a product of her circumstances. As an upper-caste woman from a Hindu family, she had the social mobility to shape her own identity. What makes her compelling is that she was obsessed with fashioning a selfhood in public, and staging archetypes while doing so. In making herself the primary subject of her work—informed by the era of Indian independence and modernity—she showed how the political project of modernity entered the interiority of the mind.

Contemporary India is a violent place, the roots of which were laid out at the time of India’s forming. It has become imperative to look back to move forward, return to this time of decolonization, and to take off the rose-colored glasses. To build other tellings of the early shaping of the Indian nation-state. In looking at the work and dreams of a woman who found herself in one center of this political, intellectual and cultural moment (as there were many of these apart from Bombay, spilling throughout the subcontinent), we enter a dialogue with her. Lajmi’s use of the materials of the psychoanalytic method to make her work lends itself to a reading of the modern subject as one that develops a self-reflexivity, that tests the limits of the mind. Lajmi’s inner world, of which she laid out the pieces for us to follow, affords something singular and extraordinary: her paintings and writings build an alternate history to the one most often told. Lajmi plainly admitted to her instinct toward keeping record: “Since I am a product of my time,” she said in the Sunday Express in 2023, “I don’t have the desire to produce timeless works. They too will have their place in history.”

At the center of this history are the fears, paranoias, and ambitions of a woman—a mother thrust into a world that was suddenly made modern. The self-styled figures in Lajmi’s paintings are desirous and full of mischief. They often appear as tricksters, chaos-makers the archetype that flits most between moralism, codes of conduct, and societal structures. The trickster has the sharpest intellect, and access to secret and hidden wisdom. The self is a representational economy, and to build selfhood was a modern concept. A narcissism slithers through Lajmi’s art and writings. It is of consequence. It is an intellectual project that unfolds the psychoanalytic method itself: turning the self into a prism through which we can enter society.

Excerpted from Lalitha Lajmi by Skye Arundhati Thomas, published by imagine/otherwise, Sternberg Press, 2024.