A s India’s cities groan and roads struggle to accommodate increasing users and their needs, state-sponsored public art initiatives along the streets merit interrogation. Lately, commissioned artists have been adorning walls with vignettes that barely relate to these streets and local environments, such as collages of leaping dolphins, implausibly large flowers, Mickey Mouse, and romanticised stereotypes such as village women at wells. Hurriedly executed with industrial pigments, these paintings have begun to cover every available surface along the streets in some cities.
They have transformed the facades of houses, schools, hospitals, government buildings, and religious institutions. Ostensibly goaded by a desire to turn heterogenous urban landscapes into smart cities and to produce a unified national identity, these wall paintings are obliterating filaments of our variegated history, making it harder for new social movements and protesters to sustain and materialise their own identities, and are causing environmental harm. The multifarious present Traditionally, Indian street spaces and surfaces have accommodated those in power and those who contest it.
Hastily overpainting surfaces is threatening these histories. Our streets have served as sites for promoting government values by hosting parades. Revolutions, too, have been fought on roads, and non-violent masses been mobilised on them.
The street fights of the Revolt of 1857 and the Quit India Movement’s marches come .