PALAKKAD: In the open courtyard of Sreekrishnapuram Higher Secondary School, a remarkable wall has come to life. Not with bricks or cement but with imagination, stories, and ink. Stretching 24 feet wide and soaring 15 feet high, a wall stitched from cloth and soaked in black acrylic sketches, has become a living tribute to one of Kerala’s greatest literary voices – Vaikom Muhammad Basheer.
Titled ‘Varakondoru Kottamathil’ (A Castle Wall of Drawings), this installation is a collective meditation on Basheer’s world, brought alive by the hands of 75 student-artists, all armed with brushes, black paint, and a deep reverence for the ‘Beypore Sultan’.
Organised as part of the Basheer Remembrance Week by the school’s student groups Vidyarangam Kala Sahithya Vedi and Varappada Arts Club, the wall was envisioned as a canvas where literature meets lines. The instructions were minimal: choose your favourite characters, dive into Basheer’s world, and reimagine it in monochrome. What followed was a creative outpouring – 100 detailed sketches that are as expressive as they are stark, each drawn with striking restraint using only black lines on cloth.
Walk past the wall, and you’ll see Abu’s wide-eyed innocence, Pathumma’s fierce simplicity, Majeed’s longing, Suhara’s silence. You’ll meet Ottakkannan Pokkar and Mandan Muthappa, figures etched in literary folklore now reborn in bold, youthful strokes. The sketches aren’t just portraits, they are distilled emotions. Sometimes humorous, sometimes melancholic, but always honest.
“The students have managed to capture not only the characters but also the mood, the rhythm, and the soul of Basheer’s writing,” Vibin Nath T K, the school’s art teacher and mentor behind the project, tells TNIE.
“The idea was not to create perfect images, but allow the children to draw Basheer and his characters in their minds that reflect the raw energy and freedom the writer offered through his stories.”
Remarkably, the entire work was completed in just four days. The students were divided into groups, each group given pieces of cloth on which they could create four to six drawings. The pieces were then glued to a single board.
Interestingly, this is not Sreekrishnapuram HSS’ first artistic feat. In previous years, the students of the school had created ‘Gandhi Yathra’, a visual narrative of Mahatma Gandhi’s life, and ‘Ramayana Chithra Katha’, an illustrated retelling of the epic. But the tribute to Basheer stands out. Not only for its scale but for intimacy as well.
“Basheer wasn’t just a writer. He was a world in himself,” says a Class 9 student Nithin V M, who is also the arts club president of the school. “I love Basheer’s books, Balyakalasakhi the most among them. As we have all read and enjoyed his books, it was easy and fun to draw the characters.”
In many ways, Nithin’s words are a testimony that ‘Varakondoru Kottamathil’ is more than an artwork. It is a quiet revolution, of students reading great works of a legendary writer, studying the characters closely and expressing their imagination through sketches, collectively.
The school authorities plan to preserve the huge art work. “We have an eight-year-old art work almost the same size kept inside our Kalabhavan Hall. This lovely work will also be preserved,” Vibin Nath says.
Castle Wall of Drawings
Stretching 24 feet wide and soaring 15 feet high, a wall stitched from cloth and soaked in black acrylic sketches, has become a living tribute to ‘Beypore Sultan’
Titled ‘Varakondoru Kottamathil’ (A Castle Wall of Drawings), this installation is a collective meditation on Basheer’s world, brought alive by 75 student-artists