The Vandal and the Scribe

Last month, I visited a friend in Jorhat, Assam. It was a scenic, peaceful ‘workation’: a necessary break from the chaos of city life. We roamed the surrounding areas with much gusto. On one trip, we visited Talatal Ghar, an 18th century palace and military base in Sibsagar, a nearby town. It was here that I saw some type that really made me think about the longevity of letterforms.

ASHIM LOVE JINKY; PRONAB

Names carved into stone walls. Not the names of old queens and princes of aeons past; these were the names of random youths from today. My first reaction was the easy one: disgust at the philistines who could not control their childhood instincts of scribbling on walls. Who raised them? (The village, of course.)*

But moving past the disdain, I started sitting with a more uncomfortable thought. What, really, is the difference between Pronab carving his name into a wall at Talatal Ghar and Ashoka having his edicts inscribed into rock faces across the subcontinent? Setting aside content entirely – the proclamations of a great empire versus the declaration of a young man’s existence – what else separates one from the other?

Letterforms, perhaps. The way they look.

Ashoka’s edicts have been studied for millennia. The letters were considered, rhythmic rather than scribbles on stone. So were the Hoysala-era Kannada inscriptions. The importance of a king’s declarations made the hand behind them create the letters intentionally, and I believe that the intentionally carved letterforms reciprocally gave the words a certain weight. Pronab’s inscription, carved in haste, probably while looking over his shoulder, communicates something too, but mostly just urgency and a lack of training, and a certain yearning for permanence that could be better unravelled by a psychologist.

PRAKASH + TRISHNA + ROUAIICK?

Here is the question that nagged at me: if Pronab had spent the time to centre his name on a pillar or keystone, in a consistent and considered manner, and had carved it with genuine skill, would we look at it differently? Perhaps not immediately, but in three hundred years I think we might consider that a work of art as well, even if it were anachronistic in the context of the original monument. And perhaps the same graffiti done in Assamese might be more appealing; giving it an in-situ sort of appeal.

And then there is the question of permission, or the impossibility of it. You cannot ask a centuries-old monument or its makers for consent. Imagine, then, a rock face deep in a forest, unseen and untouched. You go there and profess your love in carefully carved, calligraphically considered letters. No one sees it for three hundred years. When it is eventually found, is it any different from the Taj Mahal? I think not, if the letterforms are beautiful. We would call it an inscription rather than graffiti. The content is the same; the craft changes the category. A scribble can possibly be admired in a more anthropological fashion, whereas a well-drawn message intersects both humanity and art.

I have seen graffiti that genuinely stopped me. Work where I thought: Yes, this was worth it, even on a public wall. The act of marking the surface felt earned. My problem with vandalism is not the impulse, but the execution. The message is not made to look good enough.

DILW; SUNITA

So what if the Pronabs and Sunitas of the world learned calligraphy? Maybe tomb and palace insides would then be strewn with beautiful names and declarations of fleeting love, which would make the space a piece of spatial art in progress rather than a decaying freeze-frame of history. Finally however, I believe that once they learn calligraphy and see how much it takes to work on your craft and create something magnificent, they would altogether stop writing on these monuments to human effort.

*I feel like this can be read as a slight towards village folk. I do not mean that at all; I’m referencing the old proverb “It takes a village to raise a child.” I do feel that a lack of being seen or understood in the community could lead a person to carving their name on a heritage site.

That’s me sitting next to a moidam in Charaideo, thinking about my next blog post.