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 to mind. Streets have also served as stages for groups to perform their identities and assume new guises. Roads are used by Ramlila actors in Varanasi, devotees bringing Durga to her autumnal home in Kolkata’s neighborhoods, families escorting Ganapati to the Mumbai seaside, and Tazia processions commemorating Muharram in Hyderabad.
Also Read: The evolution of street art and graffiti in South India The spaces and surfaces at the edge of roads have habitually functioned as their extensions. In the mofussil towns of north India, Mughal-era brick and lime-plaster facades attest to the creation of small towns and their populace’s aspirations. Frescoes on their exterior walls signpost changing land inheritance rules, emotional ties of peripatetic traders to their ancestral homelands, and owners’ negotiations with the colonial regime.
Even Chandigarh’s monochromatic concrete walls evince a newly independent country’s interest in a worldwide trend where building materials were admired over ornament. Over the 20th century, vertical surfaces along India’s streets came to be sporadically marked with posters, stencils, spray paintings, tile murals, and compositions infected with the sensibilities of calendar art and cinema. These assemblages caught their desired audiences’ attention and made passers-by look at them, ultimately creating publics around them.
By replacing these vivid scenes of desire and dissent with bland motifs, state-sponsored urban street art macerates diversity. Rapid and expansive coverage of surfaces makes it difficult for individual artists to find spaces for their own forms of expression and for marginalised communities to make concrete their own stories and ideas of beauty. It reduces space for the performance of argumentative politics.
Even as state-sponsored wall texts and images proclaim the virtues of conserving nature and nurturing public health, agencies are steadily diluting forest laws and de-notifying protected areas. The gallons of industrial paints needed to decorate these surfaces are leading to the creation of wastewater. Industrial paints disintegrate once applied to surfaces exposed to cycles of heat and humidity.
Pigment disintegration is accompanied with the release of nano-chemicals into the soil and water bodies. These toxins are bound to travel up food chains. What are the alternatives? If government agencies wish to promote biodiversity, as messages painted on street walls proclaim, it is best to adopt a nimbler approach.
Drystone walls are best left alone. These are made of locally quarried boulders and combat erosion. As herbs sprout in their crevices, these walls help ameliorate heat build-up in cities.
Plants on these living walls temper urban noise by absorbing sound. Drystone walls also share an aesthetic sensibility with buildings in their proximity. At Karaikudi, Raghurajpur, and other locales where old traditions of frescoes exist, state agencies should investigate the composition of walls and superimposed layers.
Furthermore, authorities should help pigment discolouration of the surface by enforcing stricter zoning and traffic rules. Industrial and vehicular pollutants contain gases which react with water and oxygen to create acids that cause the crackling of old frescoes. In cities such as Dehradun and Guwahati where traditions of wall painting do not exist, municipalities, cantonment boards, and highway authorities might use funds to establish sidewalks and clean sewers and preserve monuments lining streets, and create spaces for performing artists.
Such efforts can help citizens understand their heritage by providing context. Finally, government agencies seeking to nurture pride in India as a museum without walls might learn lessons from the Berlin Wall’s surviving sections. Built during the Cold War, this wall served as a sign of Germany’s division.
Seeking to ameliorate this condition, authorities on the West Berlin side allowed artists to paint the wall. Artists from all over the world rendered scenes of hope and offered critique. Ultimately, they creatively advanced the task of democracy.
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