Street Art in India is a world apart

Mumbai’s Sassoon Dock Art Project in 2017 featured an exhibition of structures and images of workers at India’s first wet dock in Colaba (Pic- Manu Shrivastava)

Strife is perhaps the most significant commonality in Street Art; and, it’s this strife that is symbolical of the processes even the resistance to populist trends and capitalist markets. In India, the street art scenario in India’s financial capital Mumbai, in the absence of creative spunk even controlled by political entities and ‘permitted’ more often than growing organically as in the rest of the world, fails to impress.

The two-month long ‘Start Urban Art Festival’ for Mumbai’s Sassoon Dock Art Project kickstarted on 11 November 2017 and ran until 30 December 2017 featuring an exhibition of structures and images of workers at India’s first wet dock and the oldest in Mumbai, situated in Colaba. Pitched as having remained “a forgotten space of Mumbai, only home to the native Kolis living in a world of their own making,” the paintings depicted Kolis a community that has grown organically even before the formation of Mumbai and live and work in the sea on the ‘other side’ of Colaba at Machchimar Nagar.

Glossing Over Details To Fact, Flavour

Sassoon Docks instead, is a commercial venture with docks where fish are cleaned, packed and exported to markets across the world. The Sassoon Docks provides livelihood to a range of communities from across India apart from Kolis who, at best, buy the fish locally for sale in local markets in suburban Mumbai. The depiction seemed way off the mark and the local flavour and details, in fact, were amiss.

In the same year, under an initiative of St+Art Foundation, Asian Paints and Western Railway, a mural depicting Mahatma Gandhi exiting a train was created by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra at South Mumbai’s Churchgate Railway Station. A structural audit of the façade, even declared it fit during an inspection in 2018. A part of the cladding of the 81 ft x 54 ft mural of Gandhi broke loose during a cyclone and fell on a 62-year-old pedestrian killing him. The entire façade including the painting was ultimately brought down by the Western Railways.

“I love to showcase the lives and works of my people – the Agris – wherever I paint in the city,” says self-taught street artist Sapna Patil who has been involved with painting real-life thematic images across the city. Sapna is known for her painting of a seemingly-real train across a wall at Budhwar Park connecting South Mumbai’s Fourth Pasta Lane to the Machchimar Nagar on the other side of the zone and passing through a Railway Colony. 

Her depiction of the train, complete with windows, bars, steps and handles is exquisite. “I wish I get more opportunities to paint issues that affect people too,” she says. Sapna Patil’s works are an integral part of the Changing Colours of Colaba where walls are given make-overs through strategic paintings depicting the zone’s architecture and life.

A Film Industry Splashed On Public Walls

The walls adjoining the streets of Mumbai’s Western suburb Bandra are strewn with art works depicting old Hindi films, graffiti and the works, converting the zone into a virtual art-lovers paradise. The wall-paintings are impressively colossal in size, strategically placed and sure to leave an indelible mark in public memory.

The street art that has begun making pleasant appearances across Mumbai’s streets has been facilitated by the civic authorities and overseen by local politicians. With all permissions in place and authorisations, even financial support provided through non-profits involved in the venture, Mumbai’s Street art completely overlooks issues of strife and sensitivity that dot the public walls in most other cities.

Unlike French street artist James Colomina, who literally lives underground and refuses to even identify himself or his family for fear of reprise, the artists working across Mumbai’s streets feature without fear across media. Why, most of them are commercial artists some even out-of-work poster artists who have been provided livelihood by the surge in street art across India’s financial capital. 

There is simply no element of conflict in the street art of Mumbai. There’s a slim chance of an artwork being politically incorrect or harming populist sentiments when all of it has to go through the fine comb of a local politician before being vetted thoroughly by the authorities before seeing the light of the day.

And, that, is the difference in street art in India. Not that it isn’t good or lacks punch. It’s just that it’s different. Positively different and effective.

Figures On Walls To Lead The Way

Look at Swaero Artist’s For Empowerment of Society (SAFE), an alumna of artists who studied in state-run social welfare schools and colleges who feel, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”; “Swearo Bano-Hero Bano”; “If not now, when? If not we, then who?” 

A tiny Dalit colony in Kollapadakal village of Maheshwaram that lies an hour away from Hyderabad registers the inspirational lines on a colourful mural that has become all-too-familiar to locals.

In different colours on the walls of homes, over 30 murals, featuring prominent world leaders, are popular selfie points in the area. The street art walls were inaugurated by senior IPS officer RS Praveen Kumar Swaero, the secretary of the Telangana Social & Tribal Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society in 2020.

Interestingly, several murals of contemporary student achievers that include mountaineer Malavat Poorna, Kamatam Madhuri, Nemali Siddharth Darshanala Sushma, Praveen Kumar IPS and Dalit billionaire Pagidipati Devaiah were also painted on the walls. And because, as the SAFE president feels “painting local figures will make students think to become one of them.”

India Holds Distinction Of Housing Oldest Art

It is pedestrian to trace the roots of Street Art to the 1st Century BCE when Roman citizens scribbled messages to each other on dry brick walls. India’s approach to Street Art has been legendarily descriptive and narrative rather than confrontational as is the wont of the nation itself. 

For the record, cave paintings dating back to approximately 30,000 years in rock shelter home to humans, millennia ago, make Bhimbetka the oldest existing public art available. And, that lies barely 28 miles (45 km) south of Bhopal, in west-central Madhya Pradesh state in India. 

Discovered only recently in 1957, the complex consists of some 700 shelters making it one of the largest repositories of prehistoric art in India. The Bhimbetka rock shelters form a canvas for some of the oldest paintings in India. Most of these are done in red and white on cave walls depicting themes and scenes like singing, dancing, hunting and other common activities of the people staying there. The oldest of the cave paintings in Bhimbetka is believed to be about 12,000 years ago i.e., 8,000 BCE.

The paintings have been divided into various periods like Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Chalcolithic, Early History and Medieval history and are present in 500 caves out of the total of 750.

Bhimbetka is named after Bhim, among the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata. Legend says that he used to sit outside these caves and on top of the hills to interact with the people in the area. The caves derive their name from this legend and translate literally into ‘Bhim’s Resting Place’.

Cave paintings show themes such as animals, early evidence of dance and hunting from the Stone Age as well as of warriors on horseback from a later time (perhaps the Bronze Age). The Bhimbetka site is one of the largest prehistoric complexes and has the oldest-known rock art in India. 

The term ‘street’ itself is derived from ‘strata’, a short form of the Latin ‘via strata’, a road spread with paving stones. Why, the birth of Latin, as language itself, took place around 700 BC. 

In Bhimbetka, Street Art existed in 8,000 BCE, way before it came to be defined and known as such.

(With inputs from Manu Shrivastava)