The mural in Bengaluru lasted barely a few hours. By the time the city was fully awake, the artwork, an audacious critique of rising food and fuel prices, had already been whitewashed. But the erasure came too late. The photographs had gone viral, and with them, a reminder that India’s walls have become the country’s boldest political commentators. “Walls are where power once spoke to the people. Now, we speak back,” says artist Utkarsh Verma. In a landscape where political art faces censorship, scarce funding, and the gatekeeping of formal galleries, the street has emerged as one of the last truly democratic spaces. Murals that once existed simply to beautify now crackle with dissent, urgency, and defiance. Surfaces that earlier sagged under election posters erupt in colour, confrontation, and critique.
Public art festivals like St+art India across Delhi, Chandigarh, Goa and Mumbai, and smaller, fiercely local initiatives in Pune, Indore and Kochi have helped legitimise mural-making. But social media is what has given it velocity. A wall painted overnight can ignite a national conversation by morning: metros drifting through smog-thick skies, octopuses reimagined as public transport, surreal fantasies that double as sharp commentary.
Among this new generation is Tyler, the Mumbai-based stencil artist whose anonymity has become part of his political punchline. During CAA-NRC protests, he painted Santa Claus with Amit Shah’s face, cheekily captioned “Merry CAA and a Happy NRC.” Another mural showed Bart Simpson dutifully writing, “I must say Jai Shri Ram to prove my nationality.” “It’s not about hiding,” he says. “It’s about letting the work speak without a spotlight.”
Even artists who lean into whimsy cannot escape the politics of the street. Mumbai muralist Vritti Kotiann, whose six dreamlike, pop-toned murals transformed the Western Express Highway metro station into a fantasy learned this when her wildly popular octopus mural was demolished overnight to make space for a fast-food outlet. “Public art is fragile,” she says. “You create it for everyone, but you don’t control what happens to it.”
And yet, despite censorship, demolition crews, and monsoon-drenched pigments bleeding into drains, street art persists, if not on the wall, then in the photograph, the memory, the conversation it sparks. The street, after all, is an open-air museum without gatekeepers, with only visibility and risk. “Social art doesn’t need a buyer,” Verma says. “It needs a witness.” His characters such as schoolgirls demanding education, symbols of interfaith harmony, gentle icons of compassion address everyday citizens rather than patrons. Increasingly, people encounter contemporary art on a street corner, not a gallery wall and that first encounter is also often their first brush with political commentary.
In Delhi’s Lodhi Art District, rising seas and fragile ecosystems are rendered in luminous colour, aestheticising climate dread. In Bengaluru, portraits of pourakarmikas (sanitation workers) challenge caste and class invisibility. Pune’s Clean and Paint initiative revives neglected public spaces with collective acts of resilience.
For some, the political is personal. Pune-based Kartikey Sharma, who has survived cancer twice, channels his journey into deeply participatory murals. “My work invites people to talk, learn, and break silence,” he says. Others arrive at politics almost inadvertently. Indore-based Bhumika Sharma Raghuwanshi, who began painting murals simply to beautify neighbourhoods, discovered that ecological themes like her widely loved sparrow mural took on unexpected political weight in a country reckoning with shrinking biodiversity. “I used to think art had to be framed,” she says. “But when I painted my first wall, I knew this is where I belong. On the street with people.”
Today, India’s walls do far more than brighten the cityscape: they protest, warn, memorialise, and insist on being seen. Even when they are erased, they have already entered the bloodstream of public imagination. The street remembers. The people remember. The walls keep speaking. And the country is learning to pay heed.