Abstract
ABSTRACTThis essay demonstrates how public wall art on Tulsi Pipe Road in Mumbai relates to and with its everyday gazers. Through public wall art, Tulsi Pipe Road is readily transformed into a repository of post-millennial societal memory as the white paint is subsumed time and again by colours, bold images and social messaging in English, Hindi and Marathi. The images are transitory, not least because of regular whitewashing by the municipality, a performative and curious mixture of ‘uniform’ beautification, but, equally, a censorship of sorts, for the white tableau of Tulsi Pipe Road calls the people of Mumbai to action. Based on fieldwork from early 2016, this essay explores how wall art interacts with passers-by through social messaging, drawing on recent social memory and calling people to movement. Analysing a recently-installed mural in homage to the late Abdul Kalam and a collection of three panel murals that explore post-millennial experiences of being a woman in India, the essay posits that darśan, a mode of seeing usually enacted in sacred realms, is conceivably being invited in non-dharmic and, moreover, apparently ‘secular’ forms of ‘seeing’. The essay suggests that darśan is at play in the consumption of the public wall art of Tulsi Pipe Road, and thus explores the implications of how established (Hindu) Indian aesthetics of visuality are shaping the ways in which we see (in) New India.
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