Indian Graffiti

Graffiti has always fascinated me.

The ability to create art on a public space, something that is understood by everybody, and no one has to pay, or be stinking rich, to appreciate someone’s interpretation of something, is a very satisfying thought.

Surprisingly, in most countries you could get arrested for doing graffiti because it is considered as vandalism. It’s funny – it’s legal to have a gun and shoot someone, but illegal to paint on the roads. So the article went on to explain which countries were the friendliest for graffiti artists, and which the sternest.

India of course, didn’t figure in either of the lists. For you see, we don’t believe in visual interpretation. We believe in olfactory interpretations. So while you might not be able to ‘see’ anything on the roads, you can smell a lot of stuff. Wide variety of smells from the mundane (piss) to the existential (shit) to the beauties of nature (pigs) to the heavenly (chilly chicken). All kinds of smells welcome the by-passer to inhale the experience of living in India.

But on further thought, I realised my theory was hollow as Kareena Kapoor’s cheekbones.

India is also into graffiti. I mean, we don’t have any superstars like Banksy or Xavier Prou here, but we have artists in every house – the concentration of artists is more decentralised. More democratised.

You see, Indian graffiti can be divided into two broad categories:

1. Graphic Graffiti – This sort of graffiti is generally a drawing of a woman, her breasts and genitals, accompanied with images of a male member doing vile things to it. These anatomical illustrations range from amateurish rock paintings to detailed Da Vinci style drawings. Graphic graffiti is often fused with the other kind of graffiti that Indians love.

1. Textual Graffiti – Heart wrenching calls of love and belonging (“Wanna sex? Call me on 9000000007) to proclamations of love (Ajay *heart with arrow* Champa). Textual graffiti can be found all over the country. From day old trains to age old rock sculptures, we have taken expressionism beyond barriers of nature, conservation, and the Archaeological Society of India.

Early example of cheekiness in art. One can see the artist showing a bejeweled middle finger to colonial rulers.

The true nature of the democratic nature of Indian graffiti only dawned on me in the last few months due to two incidents:

1. In the school I used to teach, in the bathrooms of the primary section, scrawled across the walls in tiny handwriting, I saw proclamations of love. From an innocent ‘I love Kavitha’, to detailed imagination of women that could only have been brought about by a broadband internet connection.
2. A friend of mine stays in Aparna Sarovar, one of the posher apartments of the city. I had gone to visit him, and I found in the elevator, it was written ‘F Block’. Unable to control his artistic urges, someone modified it to ‘Fuck Block’.

These two incidents proved that Indian graffiti is not restricted to a certain age group, nor to a certain section of the society. It was all pervasive, shattering all boundaries.

These proclamations of love have always surprised me.

I have given it a lot of thought. What could have been the reason? Films? They hardly show the hero doing mundane things like reading and writing, so that couldn’t be case. Books? No books really talk about proclaiming love on rocks and buildings. The Ramayana has this one incident where monkeys write ‘Ram’ on top of stones and they start floating, but most people wouldn’t really believe that to be true. Or wait, they do!

But even that can’t be the cause, because the inscriptions are far from godly or spiritual. So what could be the reason?

After much thinking, I arrived at the culprit.

He was a lover who lived in this country 348 years ago. A hopeless romantic, he went by the name of Shah Jahan.

Now, I don’t need to elaborate on the Taj Mahal since NCERT did a good enough job at boring us all with a chapter on the Taj in English, Hindi and the local language, so I will skip that part.

But one cannot deny that the Taj Mahal is the greatest erection in the name of love. It has become a symbol of love, steadfastness, and for some – a hidden Shiva Temple.

It has also become a symbol of the country. We are reminded by Saif Ali Khan to say ‘Wah Taj’ when we sip on tea, and by Hollywood films when they have to show India getting destroyed by an alien invasion and the Taj Mahal crumbles to dust.

Frankly, if you ask me, I think Shah Jahan was a little cuckoo in the head. I mean, your wife passed away 20 years ago. Move on, man. You are a frigging Mughal king for heaven’s sake. Mughal kings back then were the power equals of a Gandhi scion in the present times. Without even a limp CBI or Katju biting on his backside.

It’s a different matter that his magnum opus nearly emptied the royal treasury, and made thousands of artisans dependent on their servants to relieve themselves.

It also scarred his son Aurangzeb so much that he built only two monuments in his entire 49 years of rule. The first was the mosque at Lahore, which for 300 years was the largest mosque in the world.

The second, is an exact replica of the Taj Mahal. One can only think of the peer pressure that the guy must have gone through.

Aurangzeb was a frugal man. He treated the royal treasury as a little more than his personal pile of wealth and even paid for his own existence by making caps and selling them. (Not made up. Kindly Google).

Now, even for a frugal man as Aurangzeb, the looming presence of the Taj couldn’t be done away with. I mean, think of his wife.

I can almost imagine her royal friends chiding her at a doggy party – “Oh, your husband hasn’t built anything for you? Hmmm. Hey, any of you want to go to Agra during the winter?”

So intense must have been the pressure that the man finally succumbed. But he went about it his way. No waiting for 20 years and chopping off hands of the workers.

He ordered his engineers to build an exact replica of the Taj, for his wife.

Aurangzeb’s ‘Bibi ka Maqbara’. The only R&D that his engineers followed was ‘Remember and Draw’.

There is no historical data to show if his wife was pissed off when she saw it.

But why am I going on about the Mughals?

That is because the Taj Mahal has left an indelible impact on our nation’s psyche. We have been clawing away at our insecurities by carving on stones and trees.

So the next time you go to a train, a park, or a 2000 year old monument and see ‘Mika love Rakhi’ written on it, don’t get pissed off.

That’s how we express our love.

We have a goddamn Wonder of the World to compete with.