The walls of Mumbai are coming alive with voices of protest

MUMBAI: Most mega cities have a thriving graffiti culture; it’s an irresistible package deal of sorts. Not Mumbai though—this city likes to buck trends.
Speak of graffiti and people around these parts invoke the ‘bean bag graffiti’—which was just a really innovative ad campaign—or the Wall Project which, noble as it was, was done with the sanction of the BMC and hence had to toe the line of political correctness.
Now, political correctness and graffiti don’t, or rather shouldn’t, go together. Consequently, the slightest hint of new political voices is fetching.
At midnight on July 7 this year, a creative director with an ad agency in Delhi drove around Mumbai in a taxi, stencilling two letters in bold Devnagri script at seven seemingly random locations from Juhu to Fort. “I was responding to the anxiety that has recently unsettled the city in the wake of Dhoble’s raids,” says the man who goes by the trade name DaKu about his ‘Fuck’ campaign.
“It shouldn’t be read as an anti-Dhoble message. I simply wanted to lighten the city’s mood and thought this would make people smile.” It isn’t simply the incongruity of the coupling—the rendering of a Western expletive in an Indian script—that made people notice the wall art, but the typography itself presented in a precise, official hand, the work of a stencil no doubt. It took DaKu some trouble to execute his project, having had to specially commission those stencils and pelt along in a cab in the wee hours to make a point. The question is, did people get it?
When DaKu asked the cabbie who was ferrying him around what he made of the word, the man replied he knew it to be an expression people used when things didn’t work out. Did the cabbie associate it with the Dhoble crackdown in particular? Perhaps not, but there’s plenty in this city that gives cause to curse.
Contemporary socio-politically charged graffiti got some wind beneath its wings with the arrival of Irom Sharmila graffiti. The stencil graffiti of the Iron Lady of Manipuri—who has been on a hunger strike since 2000, demanding that the Indian government scrap the Armed Forces Special Powers Act—was done anonymously. No one knows the provenance of the graffiti, which has also been spotted in cities Delhi and Bangalore.
The graffiti was found in two variations; the first entailed a simple black stencil of Sharmila, while the other more elaborate one represented Sharmila as a flower.
“I didn’t know about Irom Sharmila and presumed that the graffiti was a variation on the Mona Lisa. When the graffiti started turning up regularly, I asked around and eventually learnt the Irom Sharmila story,” says, final year arts student, Jyoti Jog.
While it appears that the Irom Sharmila graffiti helped in the politicisation of at least some of the citizenry, Mumbai, it appears maintains its regular scepticism in this regard.
To begin with, Jog thought that DaKu’s f word graffiti was an ad campaign. “I thought it was the work of an apparel brand or perhaps an inventive film producer. I was happy to learn that it was just some good ol’ graffiti.”
Social and political graffiti is one of the most direct ways of communicating, of critiquing the existing order, expressing angst and drawing public consciousness to an issue. An effective editorial.
“When you see something on a wall that is not commercial, it invites questions like why is this here? Who’s doing this? And it’s more engaging than advertising,” offers DaKu. Indeed British graffiti maven Banksy said that graffiti was the city’s way of ‘answering back’ to advertisements and public signs. “The city shouldn’t be a one-way conversation,” he maintained.
Banksy’s not alone. Artist Vaibhav Raj Shah, who divides his time between Baroda and Mumbai, has been busy measuring up and giving it back to the city. Earlier this year, Shah who has a Masters in Painting from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, commenced work on a project titled Superficial v.01. The project entails the giving out of marks to specific sites. Shah responded to approximately 50 sites in Bandra by giving them marks for their aesthetic merit.
The 29-year-old artist started off by making landscape paintings of “romanticised landscapes such as Dharavi” but soon his attention got drawn to a more interventionist stance. “Superficial v.01 took off on a small scale in Baroda and Delhi but it’s hit the ground running in Mumbai. The graffiti is simple; I just give out marks. So a place like Carter Road has received 58/100.”
Shah hopes to take this project across to other Indian cities as also overseas.
“This culture of giving marks and superficiality is not just our prerogative. It would be exciting to do similar work in a city such as New York,” he expresses enthusiastically.
DaKu concludes that these early days yet. “Graffiti is a new medium for us, but it will develop faster than we expect. It is a contagious art, and more people will get into it. The impact of this may not be felt right away but in the near future,” he predicts. Then too problems will persist. But we’ll have more walls.