During my school days, the thing that greatly fascinated me was the graffiti on the compound walls of our high school. They were mostly catchy political and socialist slogans and one-liners. Written in bold prominent letters in black, blue or red, they were eye-catchers. My classmates and I would love to read them and amused ourselves by decoding their meaning.
Some of the slogans lampooned the government’s policies; some others urged the common people to assemble in large numbers at a particular ground to listen to the speech of a political leader or a social activist. From them, we got to know the names of the popular venues of political meetings such as Phulbani’s Coronation Ground, Cuttack’s Kila Maidan and PMG Square, Bhubaneswar. At times, caricatures of the then PM and CM and other political leaders also appeared on the school walls.
So long as the Congress was in power at the Centre, popular slogans such as Garibi Hatao and Roti, Kapda Aur Makan were seen on the walls to impress the common man. During the Emergency from 1975 to 1977, when freedom of speech was curbed, our school walls were almost clean. In the post-Emergency period, when the Janata Party came to power at the Centre, there was once again a spurt in political activities in our village. The compound walls of our school were disfigured once again with joyful abandon.
Our headmaster was a worried man. Every time after he took pains to whitewash the wall, the invisible graffiti writers appeared from nowhere and defaced the clean walls with their writings. It was believed that they descended on our village in the wee hours with brush and paint, and melted into the darkness after finishing their work. Our headmaster’s idea of pasting ‘Stick No Bill’ posters on the whitewashed walls hardly worked. During elections, rival political parties virtually turned the wall into a battleground with their scathing slogans.
As a student of Ravenshaw College, Cuttack, in the late 1970s, I witnessed the same thing. The terracotta compound wall of our college was an easy target for the graffiti writers. Be it during general elections or college elections, slogans, quotes and misquotes showed up on the wall much to the chagrin of our principal. Anyway, the graffiti—negative or positive—disseminated an important message to society, making people conscious of their weakness or strength. Even now, when I see graffiti on the walls of buildings, I feel that people cannot be deprived of their freedom of expression in a democratic country like ours.
Pradeep Kumar Nayak
Email: pradeep_phlb@rediffmail.com