[Reader-list] not about war in iraq - our posting

[namita]

Our project is about documenting signage, trying to understand the role it plays in the experience of the city, locality, community, and what signs and symbols mean for people who create signs, and those who glance at them during their daily routine. The second phase of this project is an active participation in this making of signs through forms of public art, while right now we are in the second month of our project and we have been following the routes that signs take through the locality from production, display, wear and tear and removal or being covered up. The project is within a locality in Bangalore called Shivajinagar. 

Walks through Shivajinagar seem like an entry into a different sort of space. Shivajinagar is in opposition to various aspects of the real and imagined city of Bangalore. It is an old bazaar sprawling over dozens of lanes in the heart of the city in defiance to the new, IT enabled city connected by optical cable. It belies the aspirations of the city to become Singapore, Silicon Valley of India, and reveals the vitality and life of an older version of commerce that relies on cheap products, texture and smell, lanes made of small shops selling similar wares and special local services not available elsewhere. It is here (and in some other parts like Chickpet, Avenue Road, parts of Mysore Road) that a different side is revealed. 

The diversity of pheonomenon is what attracted us to Shivajinagar in the first place and there are in fact always some things about the place that are constantly changing in our face. From what we believed to be a predominantly Muslim community, it has now changed for us to become a mixture of Muslim and Tamil people, Dalit shop owners, Christians, Jains, some Shias and several others. From a place which we thought had a community that belonged there, it has become a place of flux – with constant movings in and out as people who live somewhere else come and work here, people who live here and go somewhere else everyday. From a place that produced most number of signs it is again a transit point where there is heavy consumption of religious and cultural signs, but most of them are produced in Sivakasi, Pondicherry, Chennai and are framed and laminated by shop owners here for the people who buy them in Shivajinagar. 

Signs reveal the diversity of castes and communities in this area – signs outside computer shops that claim variety of services including translations into the various different languages spoken in the area - urdu, kannada, telegu, english, tamil. Signs reveal different types of expressions by people, from their ambitions and superstitions (message about going to Dubai), to how they cover up signs with other signs (Karnataka Against Communalism over CM unveils statue of Saint God Thiruvalluvar), to how they remove signs (leaving Kareena Kapoor’s face preserved). 

Conversation with a vendor for different signs reveal that the tension between communities is layered and converted into a fight between signs, where the rough and tough Muslims as described by the vendor, want the signs of Islam (Haj, Ajmer dargah) to be placed on top of all other signs in the shop. The explanation that the shopkeeper gives is that this is because they have a kanoon within their religion that demands that this be done, and if the signs are placed haphazardly, on the pavement or below other signs in the display, the rough and tough type will not be pleased. Hence this particular shop avoids selling such signs, but has sold them before and is willing to make them if requested. They also sell poster of actresses which sell the most, Arnold in his three excessively muscular poses and WWF posters.

Some of our discoveries have ranged from a mural of the signs of the three religious communities on the wall painted there to prevent people from urinating on that wall which also surrounded a school. People decorate the place where they work, live, walk through – not only physically but also probably by what they chose to see. More or less like we did whenever we walked through Shivajinagar. What Michel de Certau in a passing reference describes as mobile geographies is probably the most descriptive term for how people look and glance, absorb, ignore different signs and sights on the road. For us it has been a different stream of images each time, because of the time we chose, the heat and the weather of the day, the entry point from where we have entered, who we have talked to or whether we have not, whether we framed events or images and took photographs. Each walk has brought into play different images, different strings and juxtapositions of images, different types of creators and consumers of signs. 

People also don’t decorate or leave imprints of themselves where they live, work or are. Some images are borrowed from meanings that other people might have given, chosen or foisted by someone else – like signs about Moulana Lungees which is only the company name for a product and its naming is not something special to the shopowner and is just another name, like sometimes when the scenery on the backs of autos which are glimpses of lakes, seas, boats and coconut trees in the midst of urban traffic and smoke are not chosen by the driver but by the company that makes these signs.
 
Some signs however are made with care. A young boy paints Shahrukh Khan with the word Killer in the background himself on his auto. An old man who painted the outline of Gandhi on the shutter of his shop himself, many years ago and patiently explained to us (violent youth of the new world) that an eye for an eye would mean taking a life for a life, and what good would that do. He also dismissed very quickly the question whether making this sign about ten years ago was connected to the violence in 1992. Some signs seem to have no way of explaining how they came to be like a wooden door with Dubai scratched into it again and again.

In some senses what we are discovering is what we don’t see is almost equally important in the world of signs. The blindness and deafness to sights and sounds while passing by, also make the personal map of each person of the signs that constitute their locality or even city.  




Of all the things worth doing, and not done
The things that others do instead of this

Rachel Loden