Greetings dear reader! On this cool November afternoon, I spy with my typographic eye books about visual cultures and ephemera from the Indian subcontinent. And to top that off, some memorable packaging graphics from a two-hundred years old ittar shop in Delhi.

After three issues that zoom into letterforms — on book covers, in multi-script branding, and on signs in the city — I thought it might be nice to take a step back, and think about the bigger picture this month. And since I was already beginning to take stock of my reading adventures this year (can you believe December is already in spitting distance?), books became the perfect way to have this conversation with you.

Books about visual cultures and ephemera

I have been curious about transient design objects right from when I was a teenager, but my time at the University of Reading hearing the inimitable Michael Twyman share ephemera with us week after week cemented this interest. After coming back to India, I was keen to find books and other resources that focused on ephemera from the Indian subcontinent. In this issue, I want to share three books with you that examine these visual cultures, and which I re-read this year. Each is published by an independent publisher in India, and deals with ephemeral design objects. Will there be lovely letterforms to look at as you scroll down? Sure! But that aside, I find a lot of joy in learning about the stories of short-lived objects that are all around us, and how they contribute, bit by bit, to our ways of seeing. I hope you do too.

Our Pictures, Our Words: A Visual Journey through the Women’s Movement by Laxmi Murthy and Rajashri Dasgupta

When I read the news about Letterform Archive’s exhibition Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest and its catalogue, the first thing I did was to revisit an out-of-print book that was already on my shelf: Laxmi Murthy and Rajashri Dasgupta’s Our Pictures, Our Words: A Visual Journey through the Women’s Movement. Published in 2011 by Delhi-based feminist publishing house, Zubaan Books, the book weaves a brief history of the women’s movement in India, capturing roughly thirty years between the 1970s to 2000s, with the posters produced to support it. Our Pictures, Our Words is only one component of a much larger project by Zubaan Books called Poster Women, which included a traveling exhibition of these posters, as well as an online archive.

There is a lot to learn from this book, if you’re a visual designer. In an early chapter, Murthy and Dasgupta ask us to look at how women are portrayed in the posters we see, who is represented, and who is not. A number of posters, they point out, run the risk of reinforcing the idea of a “standard woman”, who is upper-caste, city-dwelling and dressed in a saree and bindi, with differences of caste, class, religion and region erased. The working-class lower-caste woman, and the feminist woman without obvious markers of respectable femininity are largely missing. They also urge us to examine if the depiction of women in these posters should only seek to represent, or if these portrayals could be exercises in imagination.

Our Pictures, Our Words raises equally important questions about authorship and credit. Alongside posters that use use folk art like Warli and Madhubani, Murthy and Dasgupta call for us to consider power asymmetries between traditional women artists who practice these art forms and the activists who designed or commissioned the artworks. They ask — is this appropriation?

Posters for Saheli (Delhi) by Shebha Chhachhi and Jogi Panghaal. Reproduced from Our Pictures, Our Words.

I was also struck by their observation that once grassroots movements were co-opted by government schemes, international development agencies and specialised not-for-profits, and they too began producing posters, these often lacked the vitality of their predecessors. Of the scores of posters reproduced in the book, the ones that spoke most to me were usually raw and stark, or carried a feverish sense of urgency. Qualities that, I suspect, are difficult to communicate from sanitised and corporatised settings.

Gujarati poster of unknown provenance, and posters for the Christian Medical Association of India. Both reproduced from Our Pictures, Our Words.

Among my favourites, design-wise, are posters for Saheli (Delhi) by Shebha Chhachhi and Jogi Panghaal, which are immediately recognisable by their powerful illustrations. Another is a Gujarati poster of unknown provenance with a message against female foeticide that is communicated using crudely-drawn lettering and illustration. I loved the simple compositions in a series of posters by the Christian Medical Association of India, which make great use of colour, collage and bold typography. I also responded quite strongly to posters with simple line-drawings and handwritten texts in ink, such as this one below by the Janwadi Mahila Samiti.

Poster for Janwadi Mahila Samiti. Reproduced from Our Pictures, Our Words.

Indulge me as I share one last image, that of a very recent poster not from the book, which I found on the social media accounts of the South Delhi District Organising Committee of Democratic Youth Federation of India. It caught my eye because, aside from using Adelle Sans Devanagari — a typeface I helped design, it creates a forceful message of protest using unapologetic typography.

Flexing Muscles by Ravikumar Kashi

Following my time-honoured tradition of reading books about a city before I visit it, I once again picked up Ravikumar Kashi’s Flexing Muscles before traveling to Bangalore this year. The book presents a single essay by Kashi, in English and Kannada, that centres the political flex banner as a form of visual culture, and through it traces the changing face of the city. It is published by Reliable Copy, an independent publishing and curatorial practice based in Bangalore.

There is a lot that I like about Flexing Muscles. It is bilingual, and at least in English, Kashi chooses accessible storytelling over academic language. By looking at flex banners from a variety of points of view, he educates us in the ways in which we can “read” them. The text situates them within the continuum of traditional and popular art in India, deconstructing how size and proximity, as well as specific poses and motifs, are used to tell a story about who wields political power, and who is trying to cosy up to it. Instead of decrying the decline of hand-painted posters, Kashi helps us appreciate how tools like CorelDraw and Adobe Photoshop in hands of DTP designers has created space for a unique visual form and vocabulary (for more about DTP designers in India, you must read Aadarsh Rajan’s excellent essay). And to complete the puzzle, he gives an account of political movements and developments that are intertwined with flex banners — growing Kannada sentiment in Bangalore, the emergence of senes, and the aggressive linguistic, regional and religious identities that have come to the surface all across India.

In 2018, flex banners were banned in Bangalore, but Flexing Muscles and news reports I had read suggested that they are making a comeback in the city. My visit last month confirmed this.

Visual Homes, Image Worlds: Essays from Tasveer Ghar, the House of Pictures edited by Christiane Brosius, Sumathi Ramaswamy and Yousuf Saeed

The third and final book I want to share with you is an anthology of essays that studies and celebrates materials produced by popular visual culture in the Indian subcontinent. Visual Homes, Image Worlds: Essays from Tasveer Ghar, the House of Pictures reproduces photographs and writing from the online archive of the same name, and is edited by Christiane Brosius, Sumathi Ramaswamy and Yousuf Saeed, who serve as the project’s coordinators and director respectively. It was published in 2006 by Yoda Press, an independent publishing initiative in Delhi. While all the essays (in their expanded versions) and other material are available online, I do enjoy being able to read them in a book.

On the heels of Flexing Muscles, I went back to Visual Homes, Image Worlds to read a couple of pieces: Sumathi Ramaswamy’s “Artful Mapping in Bazaar India” and Roos Gerritsen’s “Chennai Beautiful: Shifting urban landscapes and the politics of spectacle”.

Kalpa Taru (ca. 1946–47) and advertisement for Asli Sher Chhaap Beedi or Authentic Tiger Brand Country Cigarettes. Reproduced from Visual Homes, Image Worlds.

I thought of Ramaswamy’s essay and a specific image in it after reading about the genesis of visual tropes seen in political flex banners. The picture on my mind was a reproduction of a print called “Kalpa Taru: Independence is our Birth Right: Galaxy of Congress Leaders who Wrought for Independence for Sixty Years” that was published by M. Thimmiah Sresty, Batchu Ragavaiah & Jonnala Pentaiah in Secunderabad in 1946-47, and is as good an example as any of a political image that uses carefully placed floating heads to paint a picture of power relations. Ramaswamy’s essay itself is about how the map of India, which like any other map would be expected to be used in specialised ways, but finds its way to mass-produced prints instead. In doing so, it shares space with political, devotional and commercial imagery, and in its mass-produced “artful” form plays an important role in how people understand the geographical boundaries of the country, and even what the country stands for.

Gerritsen, on the other hand, writes about the visual landscape of Chennai. A “beautification” initiative launched in 2009 stripped two main roads in the city of their existing posters, murals, billboards, etc., and were decorated instead with murals commissioned by local authorities. She turns her attention to these murals, looking at what they depict and why, who paints them and who they are painted for. I first encountered murals of roughly this kind when I moved to Bangalore in late 2009, and I was equal parts impressed and bemused. Their scale and proliferation in the neighbourhoods I lived and worked in — near Nandi Durga Road and Bangalore Cantt Railway Station — was staggering, but at the same time, I couldn’t help but chuckle at some of the juxtapositions I would encounter. When I think of Bangalore, and what I remember most about the visuals in the city’s public spaces, these murals jostle with flex banners for the top spot.

Advertisements for Lipton Tea (ca. 1930–40), Speshal Lajjatdar Chaha or Special Tea (ca. 1930–40) and Brooke Bond Red Label Tea (ca. 1960–70). Reproduced from Visual Homes, Image Worlds.

I ended up re-reading most of the book, and some of my other favourites this time were Patricia Uberoi’s “Good Morning — Welcome — Swagatam”, which hit differently when read in the age of WhatsApp good morning messages; Philip Lutgendorf’s “Chai Why?” about changing imagery in tea advertising; and Yousuf Saeed’s “Eid Mubarak” about Eid greeting cards from the last century, which was a timely reminder that I am already running late in my year-end scramble to send new year’s cards to friends and family.

Eid Mubarak postcard published by Hafiz Qamruddin & Sons, Lahore, posted from Lahore in 1935. Reproduced from Visual Homes, Image Worlds.

Sights and smells of Gulabsingh Johrimal

Several years ago, my friend and woodworker-designer extraordinaire, Mayank Saini, and I spent a day together in Chandni Chowk. There, he took me to a place that has special meaning to him and his family — Gulabsingh Johrimal, an establishment in Dariba Kalan, that has been making and selling ittar for over two centuries. It was my first time inside an ittar shop, and being surrounded by intoxicating smells and beautiful glass bottles of all shapes and sizes, it wasn’t hard to believe that I was in a place where magic happened. I bought myself ittar that smelled like petrichor, incense for my mother, and a few other little odds and ends, simply because the packaging graphics were irresistible. And those graphics are what I leave you with today — enjoy!

If you’ve made it this far, I have a small request — please fill this form if you think you could help me and my colleagues at TypeTogether better understand how handwriting (in the Latin script) is taught where you live. It is a fascinating subject that I’m very excited to be working on. You can learn more about this research project and our early insights in this short essay I wrote for the foundry blog, or catch me talk about it at Typography Day on November 19.

Finally, as always, thank you for reading! 🤎

This issue was first published on November 8, 2022.