Kalimpong Calling

Graffiti Democracy

The eighth essay from my 2002 book Kalimpong Calling.

If you are like me — an apolitical soul adrift in the sea of oratory and intrigue that characterises politics in Kalimpong — but still want to make sense of it all, there is a simple solution: look at the posters. Those wordy phenomena appear almost by quiet magic at night, scrawled on chart paper or brown paper, handwritten or cheaply printed. They have come to symbolise the very best of graffiti democracy.

In Kalimpong, the most widely read posters are pasted on the nondescript wall near what was once called Damber Chowk. For the post-agitation generation, this is opposite Dr. S.B. Rai’s clinic — a dirty wall underlined by an ugly network of lead pipes. By day it doubles as the pickup point for itinerant plumbers, painters, masons, and carpenters. Their expertise may be suspect, but their presence is oddly reassuring: you will always find one when you need him.

It is, of course, less prominent than the giant board in Darjeeling’s Chowk Bazaar, where countless passersby look up as though at a cinema screen. The messages there tell housewives when to begin hoarding in anticipation of a strike and alert football fans to upcoming fixtures. Kalimpong’s wall is anonymous — when asked where you learned of an issue, you identify it by its surroundings, not by name.

The character of a political party and the seriousness of its intentions can often be gauged from the posters it produces. The established parties put out predictable posters: grammatically correct, cliché-ridden, and rarely surprising. More exciting are those pasted by fringe groups — shadowy, anarchic, sometimes bizarre. My favourite was one put up by an outfit called Shiv Sena Kalimpong demanding that beef prices be lowered. It even had a hastily ink drawn tiger logo to lend authenticity. What kind of convoluted logic led to that carnivorous appeal in a dingy backroom? It was postering at its magical best.

Another unforgettable poster was one put up by the DGHC during a jamboree of shamans at the park near college. The exhortation read: kripaya apas ma ban hanahan na garnu hola (kindly do not cast spells on each other). Need one say more?

The shelf life of a poster is, at most, a week. The weaker parties’ voices are quickly plastered over by stronger rivals, or by the ubiquitous movie poster. Language too is telling: for instance, why do Tibetan anti-China posters almost always rhyme in Hindi? Perhaps the point is lost in translation, but the style is unmistakable.

The more threatening the message, the more flamboyant the scrawl. It is as though the party leader, unable to contain his energy and rage, poured it into a nightlong frenzy of poster-making. A graphologist could write essays on the psyches betrayed by those fevered strokes.

Who actually sticks the posters up? With the big parties, it is no mystery — they do it openly in broad daylight. But the threatening anonymous ones, or the beef-price rants — are they put up by the same hands that wrote them, extending their zeal to glue, paste, and press them on the wall? Whatever the case, it is a thriving, pulsating little industry — one in which the voiceless make themselves heard, the weak suddenly feel powerful, and a curious individual with a curiouser agenda can leave a mark for all to see.