The unruly city

Abstract

Many questions concerning the future of the urban Indian landscape have at their core the conflict of a modernist design aesthetic, which privileges uniformity and predictability, with what many consider to be the unsightly presence of a chaotic local aesthetic. The hand-painted signboard, a hallmark of Indian urban experience, is largely disdained by modernist planners, who became especially vocal in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010, when the goal of transforming Delhi into a ‘world class city’ envisioned, among other measures, a reining in of the city’s frenetic signboard culture. This paper examines the ingenuity of the hand-painted signboard which employs complex visual strategies such as three-dimensional depth cues, typographic innovation and visual metaphor, while assessing the unique ways in which hand-painted signage shapes the experience of public space in an urban environment. Against ideas of uniformity and order which underpin liberal modernist visions of the city both in relation to its visual cultures and the use of public spaces, this paper proposes what we call an ‘aesthetic of accommodation’: the visual and the social order here become sites for the expression of an ‘adjustment’ ethic visible in the hybrid art practice of hand-painted signboards and the multiple rather than single usage of public spaces evident in the manner in which signboards spill onto sidewalks and sidewalks onto streets.

Keywords

community hand-painted signboards intimacy sidewalks three-dimensionality urban planning

Visualizing social order

The many questions and arguments concerning the future of the urban landscape of India seem to have at their core the conflict of a modernist urban design aesthetic which privileges uniformity and predictability over local level aesthetics characterized by the arbitrariness of taste associated with the plebeian masses. In a recent article titled ‘Building an Ugly India’, architect Gautam Bhatia expresses his dismay at the current picture presented by the city of his childhood, New Delhi. Bhatia puts forth the example of Nehru Place, which was conceived in the 1960s as a raised plaza offering arcades and pedestrian links to the shops and offices it housed, and whose open frontage, in a gesture towards ‘the great piazzas of Europe’, was designed for people to ‘gather in the open spaces, surrounded by clean modernist landmarks, open air cafes spread across tarmacs, and street musicians strumming in autumn light’ (Bhatia 2001). Officially planned to cater to modernist visions of economy, efficiency, leisure and civitas, Nehru Place, however, soon went the way of other such planned spaces in India. As the author laments, over time people set up paan shops on window ledges, photocopying machines in niches intended for fire-fighting equipment, restaurants in windowless basements, kitchens under staircases, and so on. This vision of urban chaos stands in sharp contrast to the author’s memories of the city of his childhood:

I lived in a bungalow spread low along the ground, set back from the road in a private compound. Its garden, faded patches of dry earth, was tended by a slight man on his haunches, forever arranging and rearranging the clods of earth within borders of inclined whitewashed bricks. ... In the shadows stood a cream-coloured Ambassador car. Behind the car porch, there was another green painted jaffrey, fluffed white with jasmine; you could hear the quiet hiss of a summer lawn on a hot day. ... When old men in dressing gowns came into the park early morning to rub their soles in the dewy grass, I knew it was winter. (Bhatia 2001)

The above account is striking for its articulation of certain ideas about space that accrue to notions of a modern middle-class identity, including privacy for families, proximity to nature, and orderly, regulated public spaces (Brain 1997: 240; Baker 2007: 1198; Srivastava 2011: 364). Perhaps less obvious though still remarkable in this conflation of the spatial, social and moral orders is the manner in which Bhatia’s discursive move merges seamlessly with the language of taste. As a close reading of the text makes clear, the author’s description of his privileged childhood in a world which had all the trappings of bureaucratic power – unmistakably invoked through references to the colonial style bungalow and that enduring symbol of governmental authority in India which is the white Ambassador car – is as much a nostalgia for a world in which people stuck to their pre-assigned places in the social hierarchy as it is an implicit rejection of the loud claims of new money in favour of the faded charms of an older world of power and privilege painted in the genteel shades of green, cream, and fluffed-white.

Bhatia’s view is not unusual among urban planners steeped in a modernist vocabulary, whose tradition of urban social analysis has historically cast an urban environment shaped according to middle-class ideals as ‘physically hygienic, morally uplifting, and socially integrating’ (Brain 1997: 240). Against ideas of order which underpin liberal modernist visions of the city in relation to its visual cultures and the use of public spaces, this paper proposes what we call an ‘aesthetic of accommodation’: the visual and the social order here become sites for the expression of an ‘adjustment’ ethic epitomized by the ‘hybrid’ aesthetic of the hand-painted signboard and the multiple rather than single usage of public spaces evident in the manner in which signboards spill onto sidewalks and sidewalks onto streets.

In recent years, the battle over what the Indian city should look like, and how design can have a hand in reshaping it, has increasingly come to focus on what is viewed as the ‘signboard problem’. Unlike the larger billboards that typically sit on top of buildings, and are meant to be read from the distance, speed, and elevation of the viewer in passing vehicular traffic, the signboard lives at street level, painted on the façades of buildings or as shop signage mounted above the store entrance. Although occasional objections to billboards have been raised on account of traffic safety (Blecken 2008: 11), unlike signboards, these elevated structures have rarely been the subject of attack on aesthetic grounds, in India. In part, this differential treatment may be explained by the fact that billboards are mainly used for advertising high end commodities, whereas hand-painted signs mainly sell goods and services for everyday use (Elton 2006: D.05). Steps to contain signboards gained special momentum in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010 where the slogan of transforming Delhi into a ‘world class city’ envisioned, among other measures, a reining in of the city’s ‘chaotic signboard culture’ (Sharma 2009).

A particularly unimaginative approach to the signboard problem was displayed by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi which, as part of a project to give the Central Business District of Connaught Place a facelift for the 2010 Games, undertook to reform the place and its surrounding area. Signboards in places such as Shankar Market and Tibetan Market (Figure 1) were redesigned with one set of specifications for size, colour and typography on digitally-printed vinyl. While many recognized this was one case of uniformity gone too far (see ‘monotonous unity’, Sharma 2009), it is the argument of this paper that generalized references to the ‘visual pollution’ of signage neglect an important distinction in the type of signage employed in Indian cities, between the traditionally hand-painted variety on the one hand, and those printed digitally on vinyl on the other. If vinyl signs are always produced away from the location of their installation, hand-painted signs are mostly made on site, or at least not far from it. The painter not only senses the conditions of the location but has the ‘benefit’ of the immediate feedback of his client (not to mention the odd passerby on the street) and can respond to all of the localized conditions, including light, exposure to the street, competition from other signs, contours of the façade, etc. These represent two distinctly different outcomes of the design process: one of imposition, and the other of response. The first kind employs preset design templates, and has the look and feel of being imposed on its location, while the second refers to design that is a localized, inventive expression of craft. In lumping all signage into an undifferentiated category of visual pollution, we lose the qualitative distinctions between the digital and handmade, and the different ways in which these contribute to our collective experience of the city. It is our contention that hand-painted signs represent a distinct category of Indian artisanship reflective of an impulse towards decoration and embellishment rooted in the vital tradition of Indian decorative arts, and possessive of visual vocabulary rich in form and metaphor. Our paper seeks to examine the ingenuity of the hand-painted signboard, especially its use of complex visual strategies such as three-dimensional depth cues, typographic innovation and visual metaphor, while assessing the unique ways in which such signage shapes the experience of public space in an urban environment.

Figure 1.

Tibetan market. Photo by Ira Raja

Aesthetics of signplay

Although hand-painted signs from a variety of cultures, Eastern and Western, have historically shared a penchant for representing letterforms understood as having depth and dimensionality by employing shading techniques, the innovative application of textural dimension in the form of pattern, colour, and three-dimensionality remains a distinctive aspect of the visual cultures of South Asia not to be found in the use of comparable media elsewhere (Frietag 2007: 101). Indian sign-painters embrace 3D illusion with a unique fervour, employing it to enhance even the simplest representation of word or name. Such is the regularity with which sign-painters employ 3D illusions that these have become part of the painter’s visual ‘toolbox’ – used with the same frequency as colour, pattern, or symbolic iconography to capture the attention of the viewer. The diversity of approaches to what we might call ‘dimensional embellishment’ is remarkable in the range and extent of its invention.

Although how and when the use of 3D graphics came to be so identified with Indian signage remains open to speculation, the implied perspectival construct often employed as part of their rendering style suggests an ancestry that may be traceable to the pictorial convention of perspective found in Western oil painting introduced to India in the colonial period of the late 19th century. As Christopher Pinney’s work on popular visual cultures of India suggests, the technique of perspective in art is historically freighted with meaning. Linear perspective, a compositional system employed to impart the illusion of 3-dimensionality, Pinney argues, was critical to the representational scheme that underwrote colonial certitudes (2004: 66). Indeed, 19th-century European beliefs in the Great Idea of Progress – which measured the relative advancement of civilizations according to their distance from past traditions, and which formed the basis of colonial faith in the superiority of the West over what were viewed as more tradition-bound cultures such as India – assumed a linear view of time which placed the colonizer in the privileged realm of history while consigning the colonized to a mythical space of cyclical time. Indigenous artistic traditions, such as miniature painting, became symptomatic, in this scheme of things, of a flawed temporality where the various events on the picture plane seemed to all ‘happen’ at once, rather than be situated in terms of a sequential narrative plotted along a linear time scale, visually reinforced by the orthogonal projections of the perspectival composition. The sign-painters whose work we examine in this paper display a remarkable competence in perspectival rendering only then to bring their own distinct aesthetic sensibility to bear upon it. These sign-painters incorporate a mix of visual techniques that include not just approximations of linear perspective traceable to the ‘great colonial euphoria about the transformative power of observational rigour’ (Pinney 2004: 31), but also traditional graphic strategies for intimating 3D depth cues – which were regarded by the colonial aesthetic regime as being of a lower order than linear perspective – such as occlusion, extrusion, interposition of objects, or shade and shadow. Whereas perspectival space directs the ‘narrative focus’ in which events occur along the orthogonal projections, Indian signs don’t follow that construction of a linear narrative; rather, they seem to navigate from location to location.

As Michael Kubovy argues, in The Psychology of Perspective in Renaissance Art (Kubovy 1986: 16), linear perspective is dependent on the constant and controlled location of the viewer relative to the picture, an experience which also counts on the viewer’s complicity in accepting the composition as corresponding to the viewer’s experience of 3D space. In Indian signage extruded letterforms or words painted in axonometric style might be skewed by applications of perspective-like treatments – word forms can diminish in size in one direction or another, implying a retreat into the distance of the picture plane – but unlike the painters of the Italian Renaissance who created depth of space occurring somewhere behind the picture plane, and who utilized perspective in order to knit together all of the elements of their pictures into one narrative, Indian sign-painters often use a variety of dimensional techniques in the same signboard. One name or word might allude to single point perspective while another part of the sign’s message might use an axonometric projection. Multiple light sources are routinely used, resulting in a perception of space ‘ungoverned’ by a single perspective, effectively producing a state of ‘creative visual ambiguity’, in which the viewer’s perceptual system is challenged to reconcile highly variable depth cues in a simultaneous condition. It is in this condition of simultaneity that the signboard shares the tradition of the Indian miniature in which the picture plane is filled with the multiple, simultaneous actions of characters unconstrained by the strict requirements of linear perspective and narrative.

The bottom line for the sign-painter is to please his client, and the client wants signs that both appeal to and achieve salience in the mind of his customers. By introducing visual ambiguity (via multiple light sources, for instance) into the graphic frame, the sign-painter challenges our assumptions of how the known world works. As recent research in cognitive psychology shows, the deliberate slowing down of the reading process (by making text more difficult to read) actually enhances retention of information (C. Diemand-Yauman et al. 2010). By adding layers of complexity and ambiguity, the sign-painter invites the viewer to take a little more time to solve the visual puzzle of the painted message. A message will achieve a condition of salience in the mind of the reader or viewer when they encounter visual strategies that require a bit longer to decipher – in other words, prolonging the duration of perception. Moreover, if perspective draws the visual back into the space behind the picture plane, the use of three-dimensionality privileges the space in front of the picture plane. The embellished lettering, often rendered in bright colours, appears to leap out of picture frame towards the viewer, establishing what Pinney calls ‘the sense of sticky mutuality’ (Pinney 2004: 156). By way of illustrating the above claims, let us now turn to some concrete examples.

Dimensional embellishment

The illusion of depth in the picture plane is a fundamental component in the sign-painter’s visual aesthetic, and can be thought of as their unique methodology of embellishing visual space, one where the certitudes of linear perspective are unravelled by a range of visual strategies competing for the viewer’s attention.

In this example from an entrance to a shop in Parvathagiri, AP (Figure 2), the Telugu lettering appears to have been extruded, a primary strategy in creating illusion of dimensionality. But the well-defined, measured solidity of this word/symbol stands in obvious contrast to the deep space of the night sky in which it seems to have been set adrift. Thus freed from the confines of ‘normal’ relationship to a horizon line and their demands on the position of the viewer, this word becomes a solid mass that has the effect of floating up and away from the viewer, and even projecting above the viewer’s position. The bit of gold bunting or wrapper on the surface of the letterform gives it even more the impression of dimensionality through the depth cue of occlusion. An implied light source is a key to dimensionality, one we as viewers usually assume comes from above. But many sign-painters employ multiple light sources, giving a slightly destabilized effect to the image. In this sign the face of the letters is rendered in a way that implies the light source might be behind the viewer, shining onto the face of the letters, and yet the shading of the dimensional parts of the letters implies light coming from below. An unambiguous light source is a key signal of position of an object relative to the viewer, but Indian sign-painters routinely employ multiple light sources in a single image, destabilizing the viewer’s assumed position relative to the image.

Figure 2.

A shop in Parvathagiri, AP. Photo by Ken Botnick

This wall sign (Figure 3) is unusual in several ways. First, it is rare for a sign of this type to be ‘floated’ against such a spare white background. The whiteness has the effect of setting the words in much greater, and starker, contrast than we are accustomed to seeing in Indian signs. But the word/image construction is quite complicated. The block-like lettering has been given a mass not just by the implied, extruded, thickness of the letters but also by their squareness which implies a heavier, weightier image than the flowing, rounded letters of traditional Telugu writing. There is some perspectival play in the portrayal of the word due to its diminishing size as the word moves to the right, away from the viewer. The shading begins brighter, then darkens as the word moves away from the viewer, another important depth cue. The extrusions of the letters get a standard shaded treatment to imply that the light comes from behind the viewer, yet something peculiar happens: shadows move toward us in the foreground, implying a light source coming from behind the word. With that shadow (which is actually in the wrong position, but just enough to give a little productive ambiguity) the ground projects toward the viewer and implies a planar projection that runs counter to the vertical compositional space. And then immediately below it the space flattens once again under the more standard lettering that conforms to traditional flat wall painting. The sign-painters, influenced – but unconstrained – by precision in rendering 3D space, employ constantly shifting viewpoints with a single frame. Word/objects project and recede, space deepens and flattens, as if magically, according to the demands of the message.

Figure 3.

Wall sign. Photo by Ken Botnick

The sign in Figure 4 (Kisan Electric Works) takes an altogether different approach to dimensionality. The lettering in the upper left has a pictorial quality, the overall effect of which is the result of the intricate and subtle relationship of the massing of the word, appearing as if seen from below, and the mirror-like surface treatment of the letters. The letter surfaces could be experienced as reflecting the sky, but they could also be viewed as transparent, revealing a world below contained in the depth of the bodies of the letters. Outlines in contrasting colours and implication of light source from above exaggerate the effect of depth. The extrusion and deep space of the word on the left is contrasted here by the embossed effect of the word on the right, two decidedly different depth cues: one moving away from the viewer, the other toward her, side by side.

Figure 4.

Kisan Electric Works. Photo by Ken Botnick

The above discussion foregrounds the signboard as a space for a dramatic encounter between two rather different visual vocabularies – one drawn from the broadly Western realist tradition of perspective, and its related values of precision, discipline, rationality, and a linear representation of time, first introduced in India in the late 19th century; the other from an older, indigenous Indian tradition of miniature art which privileges myth, magic, emotion, and non-linear time. The aesthetic conventions that have emerged from this creative encounter over the last century, of which the hand-painted sign is a vivid testimony, are unique to the visual language and vitality of streets in India.

Aside from embellishment, Indian signboards also tend to be rich with metaphorical references which have the sense of deepening the experience of the message for the viewer by engaging the viewer’s cognitive function to solve a bit of a puzzle. We illustrate this point with the following two examples (Figures 5 and 6). In the small Tea center sign in Baroda (Figure 5) the painter utilizes two types of languages, the written and the pictorial, in a combined message that does what the best design is expected to do – convey meaning and, maybe more importantly, delight – via an economy of a language construct called a rebus. The advertisement for a tractor (Figure 6) utilizes the cognitive function of amodal completion, using the words coupled with a turban to convey the impression of a complete form of the face. The brain gives such preference to facial recognition that even exaggerated expressions such as this one will inspire the viewer to associate the message with a facial form, in this case complete with ample moustache.

Figure 5.

Tea centre sign in Baroda. Photo by Ken Botnick

Figure 6.

Tractor advertisement. Photo by Ken Botnick

But the use of metaphor also serves another function – namely of constituting a community. In his essay on metaphor and intimacy, Ted Cohen claims that there is a unique way in which the maker and the appreciator of a metaphor are drawn closer to one another. Cohen identifies three steps to this process: First, the issuing of a somewhat concealed invitation by the speaker; second, the exertion of a special effort to accept the invitation, by the hearer; and third, the acknowledgement of a community produced by this transaction. Cohen concedes that these steps are not specific to metaphoric language but in fact are part and parcel of any communication. However, their involvement in ordinary literal discourse, he argues, is so pervasive and routine that they go unnoticed. It is only in the use of metaphor that one becomes aware of the three-stage process by which communication takes place (Cohen 1978: 8).

While the sense of close community results, according to Cohen, from the shared awareness that a special invitation has been given and received, it also draws from the knowledge that not everybody could make that offer or take it up. Although generally speaking, all literal use of language is accessible to all those who speak it, a figurative use can be inaccessible to all but those who have shared information, knowledge, beliefs, intentions, and attitudes between them (Cohen 1978: 9). In the following section we take up a few examples which illustrate this ‘exclusive’ aspect of community created through the medium of signs.

Signs of community

In her essay ‘Signs of Life, Spaces of Art’, Johanna Drucker differentiates the ‘reference function’ (to a product, event or other consumable item) of signage from its ‘identity function’ (in itself):

In its reference function signage serves as an indexical link to the systems of commerce, advertising and exchange, of which it is a visible articulation, while in the identity function signage exists as an image or icon with aesthetic properties that are symptomatically indicative of their time, place and historical circumstances of production. (Drucker 2000: 34)

In the case of hand-painted signage, Drucker’s argument can be extended to claim a much more dynamic, even intimate, relationship between signs and the time, place, and historical circumstances of their production, than suggested by Drucker’s use of the term ‘indicative’. Consider the next two signs, both of which are caught in a multidirectional conversation with their surroundings.

When the sign-painter of the advertisement for men’s underwear (Figure 7) unexpectedly encountered a drain opening in his path he reoriented his composition, spontaneously incorporating a navel in the man’s torso. Like graffiti, these commercial signs work with existing elements of the city in a relationship of accommodation rather than imposition. In the second image (Figure 8), the painter is advertising underwear as well as a vest, and once again he finds a drain opening in his path, and once again he composes the image in a way that the drain falls exactly where a navel would be, if we could see through the vest. In a third composition (Figure 9), the drain is yet again a central feature. Its length now serves as a canvas for advertising a beauty parlour.

Figure 7.

Men’s underpants advertisement. Photo by Ken Botnick

Figure 8.

Men’s underpants and vest advertisement. Photo by Ken Botnick

Figure 9.

Beauty parlour advertisement. Photo by Ken Botnick

In each of these instances the ordinary drain, which is a source of great fuss and anxiety in India, features prominently either as part of a composition or as canvas. In each instance, though, the sign-painter simultaneously camouflages and highlights this humble necessity of civic life, which is also the under seam of the city, not to mention one that is always in danger of coming apart! The first two signs are a source of gentle humour in the public space produced by an image of a man trying to ‘wear’ a drain opening as best he can. The third image incongruously employs a drain to advertise for a beauty parlour. What the sign-painter had in mind in his treatment of the graphic elements is unclear; the three squares take on the quality of an abstract painting from the Russian avant-garde, and who’s to say how those squares relate to the concept of beauty. They might have been painted more in relation to the drain itself, the idea of things cascading down the inside of the pipe, for instance, or the blue squares referencing the water that flows within.

As Ted Cohen notes, metaphors are surprisingly like jokes. With a joke, too, there is first the realization that a joke has been made, followed by understanding, or what is called ‘getting the joke’ (Cohen 1978: 10). The property in common with metaphors that the above ‘jokes’ are meant to illustrate is their capacity to form or acknowledge a community and thereby to establish an intimacy between the teller and the hearer (Cohen 1978: 11). The outsider to whom the failure of civic life in the city is merely a nuisance is excluded from this community which comprises those who have to live with the failures of civic life on a daily basis, and who have therefore to dig deep for other resources, such as humour, to deal with its frustrations.

There is yet another way in which these signs may be read as constituting a community. In the often grey and grim surroundings of urban slums, commercial signs are sometimes the only resources available to people looking to liven up their surrounding with some colour and embellishment. If we agree with David Brett’s characterization of decoration as ‘an integrator of individual pleasure with social life and its ideological commitments’ (Brett 2005: 105), then the work of the sign-painters in its decorative glory might be seen as one mechanism for linking the personal desire for decoration with the sphere of public space.

Signboards on sidewalks

We began this essay with Gautam Bhatia’s concern with the general perversion of modernist visions of the city, and the more specific direction that attempts to make the city more ‘legible’ took in the form of introducing standardized signboards. The following images from Ahmedabad (Figures 10 and 11) at once speak to these twin anxieties. One of the crucial distinctions of modern urban planning, namely between private shops and pedestrian paths, is here confounded by a proliferation of signs, which literally extend the realm of the shop into the public space of the street.

Figure 10.

Private shop spilling onto the sidewalk, Relief Road, Ahmedabad. Photo by Ken Botnick

Figure 11.

Signage spilling onto the sidewalk, Relief Road, Ahmedabad Photo by Ken Botnick

Complaints against such transgressions are usually framed in terms of threats to pedestrian safety. As the following newspaper report on ‘the growing vendor menace’ in a posh South Delhi residential locality notes, ‘[w]ith most pavements encroached upon by vendors and cycle-rickshaws, pedestrians are left with no option but to walk on the main road and brave the fast moving traffic’ (Chitlangia 2012: 4). For the president of the above Residents’ Welfare Association, this was clearly a law and order issue:

Almost every day a new stall is coming up. A tailor sits on the pavement; a street-food vendor sits right outside the main entrance of a block. During lunch time there is a jam. This is an upscale area and there is no need for such street-food vendors. Moreover, they don’t have a licence to operate. (Chitlangia 2012: 4)

To the encroacher, on the other hand, the pavement may be a place of habitation or livelihood: ‘I have been setting up my currency-exchange counter here for more than 18 years. I applied for a tehbazaari licence in 2007 but there has been no response from the [Municipal Corporation]. Even we have to earn our livelihood’ (Akram 2012: 4).

While the upper-middle-class resident, to whom the pavement is primarily a passage, frames his objection to encroachment as an illegitimate exploitation of a collective resource considered essential to civic life (Chattopadhyaya 2009: 121; Baker 2007: 1188), his chief concern is with the challenge that such transgression poses to his own authority and power to shape public culture (Baker 2007: 1199). Also evident in the president’s outburst is a keenness to protect his own lifestyle, and that of others like him, which comes under threat when ordinary people abandon their pre-assigned places on the anonymous margins of society to relocate themselves in places where their marginality is more visible and in-your-face. Street-food vendors in upscale colonies, who obviously cater to the vast army of underclass which services these colonies rather than their well-heeled residents, disturb the elite fantasy of living ‘abroad’. The catch cry of transforming Delhi into a world-class city through the drive for visual homogeneity likewise may be read as a wish to promote a hierarchy of values privileging Western taste making over and against India’s difference that is presumed backward and less civilised. (Chattopadhyay 2007: 118). Hand-painted signs are among the worst offenders in this regard as they are not readily assimilated to a modernist aesthetic. Additionally, hand-painted signage is used largely to sell ordinary objects of everyday use, whereas digital signage is still used for more high-end commodities. Wittingly or unwittingly thus hand-painted signs come in for special attack because their distinctly Indian aesthetic comes to epitomize the plebeian tastes of an amorphous mass public.

In popular understanding, public spaces are defined in terms of their general visibility and access to the public. But the public domain is also associated with social heterogeneity and democratic political life. Elite outrage at the spatial transgression characteristic of Indian cities tends to overlook these multiple meanings of a public space, not all of which are equally democratic (Baker 2007: 1200). This outrage is mainly concerned with preserving the set of spatial relations which are foundational to the formation of the nation-state (see Chattopadhyay 2007: 112). Its characterization of the tendency of Indian shops to spill onto sidewalks, and sidewalks onto streets, as ‘confusion and incoherence’ marks a failure to respect the idea that there might in fact be an identification with public spaces which is peculiar to India, and which is different from ‘the recorded norms of public life in the west’ (Bhatia 2001). Crucially for the argument of this paper, it is also a failure to note that, while these transgressive uses of public space may have been determined by need more than by choice, they often involve the exercise of tremendous creativity (Chattopadhyaya 2009: 121). Writing on walls may seem like an insignificant intervention in public space, but it is the argument of this paper that it is through such acts and signs that a large number of city residents secure a sense of belonging to the city (see Chattopadhyaya 2009: 116). The presence of hand-painted signboards in the city is an aspect of its democratic culture. Through their sensitivity to location, individuality and nuance, their textual indeterminacy, their accessibility as a medium of self-expression and agency (Baker 2007: 1207), the humble hand-painted signboard makes a critical contribution to the collective experience of the city.

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