Lala Rukh 1948 – 2017

Lala Rukh was a prominent artist and activist. Her work has been featured in Documenta 14 in 2017 and shown extensively over the world.
She was a founding member of the Women’s Action Forum and formed alliances with feminists all over South East Asia. She taught Fine-Art for over 35 years and founded the MA Program at the NCA, Lahore.

As a young person, she was able to make choices for herself through the enlightened & liberal influences of her parents who surrounded her and her sisters constantly with the most erudite of cultural influence-musical, artistic, intellectual and often referencing to Sufism. These , as well as her privileged education and her own unique way of thought allowed her to process her experiences in such a way that they took her above & beyond her peers & contemporaries so that she achieved a kind of intellectual nirvana much earlier & far more deeply than others who also constantly strive for such enlightenment.

The essential element that influenced her bearing in society & her human relationships was a high level of both humility & modesty which simply did not allow her to talk openly about her thoughts or her work or even her own private life. For her, to do so was to boast, which was both unnecessary and distasteful.

As her thought & intellect developed she adopted more & more a Sufi lifestyle guided by asceticism, simplicity & purity. This had a huge & un-ending influence on her work. She was not bound by the dictates of societies that the rest of us conform to- marriage, children & conventional jobs. Instead she embraced an altruistic way of life which did not conform in any way to the images of ‘types’ that we all define ourselves by.  What she said, what she did and the work that she undertook were purely an expression of the evolution of her soul towards a life that served others and sought enlightenment.

To understand the simplicity of her life is to understand the very essence of Lala.

Witten by Maryam Rahman and Sumaira Khan