Cityscape: Graffiti is here to stay

Published September 20, 2009

One night in the early 1970s in Karachi, on a clean whitewashed wall of a house in Bahadurabad, some highly incensed political activist had scrawled the words, “Mehraj Mohammad Khan ko reha karo”. Next morning the owner of the house, visibly annoyed, brought out pail, brush and distemper and cleansed the wall of the unwanted intrusion. It was his first introduction to graffiti, the visible language of protest.


The following morning the message made another appearance. But this time the scribe had apparently enlisted the services of a calligraphist, who had used a classical nastalique script, possibly in the hope that the home owner would regard the memo as a work of art and something that ought to be preserved and displayed to the world at large. It was accompanied by a translation in English for the benefit of those political officers in the foreign consulates who have to dispatch a weekly summary.


The resident was not amused. He was, in fact, furious, and was about to drive to the nearest police station to register a case against 'person or persons unknown' when a thought suddenly came to him. Picking up brush and paint he wrote under the original message, “Mehraj Mohammad Khan es ghar main nahi qaid hai”. That put a stop to the scribbling.


If graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property, however sophisticated or crude, it certainly existed in Karachi long before the movement evolved in the 1970s from a masculine working class subculture, surfacing in New York, and spreading to Philadelphia and eventually to other poverty-stricken pockets in the US.


In fact, the first time this reviewer encountered a marking in a public place in Karachi was in the early 1960s in the washroom of Pakistan's largest bank where a customer, in an attempt to be helpful, had scribbled the telephone numbers of a few charitable ladies, which were accompanied by some exceptionally crude drawings.


These days, one has to only drive through a Pakistani city to see graffiti displayed in all its infinite variety.

 

Madressahs that depend on the skins of slaughtered animals, mendicants that advertise their wares, aspirants for a party ticket at the forthcoming election. Apparently, all one really needs is a spray gun, a can of paint and a blank surface; and, of course, a grouse. Walls of residences, public buildings, bridges, defaced billboards, train bogies, trucks, even the surface of roads provide an ideal place to visually express one's thoughts.


Though there is the occasional graffiti artist on the university or college campus, who is not really nursing a grudge and who just wants to express his infatuation with a member of the opposite sex, or convey his utter disillusionment at an unrequited love affair, graffiti in Karachi invariably represents some kind of protest. The dissent could be against political rivals, opposing trades union, dictatorship, the imposition of emergency, the US, police brutality, injustice, wrongful dismissal, retrenchment and when everything else fails, the rising cost of living.


One of the abiding truths about graffiti is that since it is spontaneous and secretly produced, it presents an authentic insight into the political undercurrents that are taking place in a country. An excellent example of this is the anti-Taliban graffiti that was splashed on the walls of Khaliqdina Hall and the Lasbela Bridge in Liaquatabad in 2008. It was the first time an art form had been used in such an organised manner to voice a protest against an organisation that people had tacitly assumed had an abidingly powerful grip on the popular imagination.


The imposition of Emergency in 2007 unleashed a number of campaigns against a former president in which graffiti sprouted like a field of tulips in Amsterdam. In the forefront of the crusade was an artist by the name of Asim Butt.

 

 He ought to have been nicknamed the ejector, for he painted the eject button, and the eject seat and wanted the military to be ejected from the presidency. Butt's symbol of resistance—a red triangle over a red rectangle—was widely recognised.


And he was in rather the same position with the local police as was Andrej Wajda the film maker, with the Polish censors before the fall of communism. Both artists, however, managed to get their message through.

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