Ode to the Road: Truck Art of North IndiaImage Gallery
Visual Arts
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When A. Ramachandran exhibited his monumental mural Yayati (60’ x 8’ along with a group of 13 bronze sculptures) in 1986, he was bitterly criticised by the art community. Few realised that the master artist was turning away from painting the existential crisis of modern man. He was rejecting the…
in Interview
Vijay Kumar Yadav, 40, is a truck driver from Sant Kabir Nagar in Uttar Pradesh. He likes to hum a couplet[1] when he drives his truck. It speaks of his predicament, he says, for ‘a driver has no home other than the truck he drives.’[2]
In his 20-year career as a driver, Yadav never got such a…
in Article
Trucks are universally known for their utility in freight transportation. But in South Asia, they have a special place in the public imagination: they are seen as mobile canvasses for art with their bodies decorated with colourful paintings and artistic expressions. A significant part of truck art…
in Overview
Trucks are universally understood as means of freight transportation, but in India as in South Asia, they serve as sites for literary production as their bodies are decorated with poetic expressions. Those expressions often represent the truck driver’s worldview, as they deal with the ideas of home…
in Module
Professor Sudhakar Nadkarni is a pioneer in design education in India. He introduced the first postgraduate design programme in 1969 at the Industrial Design Centre (IDC), Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and later helped establish the Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology,…
in Interview
The shops, even when small, even when dingy, had big, bright signboards, many-coloured, inventive, accomplished, the work of men with feeling for both Roman and Sanskrit (or Devanagari) letters.
V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now
In heavy tones of black or multicoloured hues, hand-…
in Overview
The streets, roads and lanes of Delhi hold vestiges of vernacular design practices in the form of hand-painted lettering styles.
The regularly encountered signages, whether commercial hoardings of the local kirana (grocery) shop or names of streets, employ a rich variety of lettering techniques.…
in Module