Street artist, designer, and creative entrepreneur Hanif Kureshi lost his life to lung cancer in September. The 41-year-old co-founder of India’s first street art organisation made his mark in Indian cities and abroad with his ingenious use of public space as a canvas. A student of art and visual design at Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, he started his artistic journey as a graffiti writer in 2008. Previously, he also worked as a Senior Creative at Wieden+Kennedy and Senior Art Director with Ogilvy & Mather.
Kureshi’s art practice hinged conceptually around a democratising critique of the art world. For him, art did not need to be restricted to the gallery or the museum and was not only for the elite but instead for all, a motto he adopted as the tagline for his brainchild, the St+Art India Foundation. Owing to his creativity and entrepreneurial acumen, he was often referred to as an Indian Banksy by journalists and colleagues, a comparison he admittedly found mildly offensive to his distinctive Indian aesthetic and sensibilities.
Reflecting on his untimely passing today, one is compelled to think anew about the fleeting nature of life, but also of the very form of art he practised and mastered. Through his work, he invited the viewer to appreciate the transience of creativity. One of his notable murals, Time Changes Everything (2016), located in Lodhi Colony, New Delhi, drew attention to the innovative interplay of light and shadow, as it visualised the very concept of time. He used a selection of English letters so as to cast an evolving shadow through the day, becoming visible every day from 9 am to 3 pm as the sun cast a light on top of the wall, and disappearing as the sun set, effectively acting as a sundial.
Time Changes Everything Mural by Hanif Kureshi, Lodhi Colony, Delhi. | Photo Credit: Akshat Nauriyal and Pranav Gohil
He had first experimented with the theme of time at the Kochi Biennale in 2012, using mirrors to reflect phrases like “Time Flies” and “Time Travel” onto walls, streets, and parked vehicles. These “temporary” works on the street were only visible for a few hours each day, acting as testaments to Hanif’s recurring philosophical engagement with the idea of ephemerality and to the meta-textual nature of his art.
Art-preneur by day
Hanif’s first enterprise, St+Art India Foundation, was born in 2013 as an independent arts organisation from a collaboration between him and curator Giulia Ambrogi, media professionals Thanish Thomas and Akshat Nauriyal, and investor Rajeev Bahl. What began as a small initiative with sporadic street art supported by occasional funding and local permissions has now grown into a sizable non-profit that works towards bringing art to public spaces. St+Art India has been holding large-scale urban art festivals since 2014, allowing a nascent graffiti and street art scene in the country to evolve into a fully-developed art movement, which has played a significant role in putting Indian cities on the global map.
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During the 2016 street art festival in Delhi, French artists Lek and Sowat collaborated with Kureshi to create a mural titled We Love Dilli, inspired by local children who play cricket at the site. While Sowat painted characters resembling Sanskrit letters over a black background, which Lek then transformed with a “colour rain” effect, Kureshi added the phrase “We Love Dilli” in Devanagari script to localise the mural to its setting. It did not take long for this mural to gain visibility with global travellers through tourist websites and social media, where photos of visitors with the mural went viral. Several other such site-specific murals from Kureshi and his organisation have attempted to position Indian cities on the national and global stage.
Despite having progressed from being a design consultant to graffiti writer to street artist, Kureshi’s interest in letters persisted. When he was younger, he had himself aspired to be a sign painter and often referred to his own love for the alphabet, as well as to the prestige accorded to sign painters in his hometown of Talaja, Gujarat. His training in typography seemed to have merged with the influence of the American hip-hop movement on Indian popular culture during the 1990s and resulted in lettering experiments in his work.
“Watching Hanif Kureshi work was to become witness to not just the clever performance of street art but also to the many contingencies of urban life in India that come to surround such a performance.”
This combination led to his design and typography initiative “Handpainted Type”, which encourages and preserves indigenous typeface fonts of sign painters from India, and which always positively informed his identity as a street artist. Through this, Kureshi aimed to re-popularise digitally the craft of street sign painting while facilitating national and international projects for Indian sign painters from all over the country, paying them half of the earnings while reinvesting the other half into his organisation.
Dacoit by night
Very few knew through the time that he lived, however, that Kureshi worked as graffiti writer Daku across the city of Delhi. Through the 2000s, tags of his name were seen strewn across the capital in areas like Hauz Khas, Saket, Malviya Nagar, Okhla, Chirag Dilli, and Nehru Place, among others. Bearing a pseudonym that stands for a Hindi word for “bandit”, Daku may be said to be one of the first graffiti writers in India. When asked about his graffiti, he often referred to himself as a “writer” and was a legitimate member of the international graffiti artists’ collective 156, which includes artists from France, Germany, and the US.
Although he denied being a direct part of Western hip-hop cultures, the global influence of hip-hop graffiti was subtly evident in his tags, particularly through the various fonts he experimented with in both English and Devanagari scripts. Daku’s quest for “getting up” in the city and the allure of his concealed identity drew inspiration from the roguish persona of the hip-hop graffiti writer, while his intentions, style, methods, and aesthetics all echoed the classic New York style of graffiti letter-writing. He styled his pieces to resonate with a local audience, crafting Devanagari letters that were both ornate and complex, and skilfully appropriating this knowledge to enhance his popularity while adhering to the subcultural aesthetic codes of graffiti.
Mat Do by Daku, stencil, Connaught Place, Delhi. | Photo Credit: st-artdelhi.org
The significance of his pseudonym transcended mere symbolism, allowing him to literally “rob” visual space and linguistic territory. For him, the language of the city was an indispensable prerequisite and ingredient to work with. Positioning himself against the corporate takeover of city spaces, Daku made tactical and witty use of the available linguistic system in the city, a type of interventionism that has previously been made by globally renowned street artists like Banksy and JR. In this sense, his work—stickers, stencils, paste-outs—came to be included in the expanded category of street art, as much of it, unlike graffiti tags, aimed to convey a social message. Before the 2014 Indian general election, he painted a stencil featuring a fist with an inked middle finger, titled “Mat Do” at F-Block, Connaught Place, ambiguously playing on language using a contronym that simultaneously instructed viewers not to give their vote and encouraged them at the same time to vote.
Some of his other stencils and stickers appeared as attachments to or alterations of road signage, changing and parodying official signboards; in one instance, he stuck additional words to signage that read “STOP” throughout South Delhi to produce minimalistic but shocking messages like STOP RAPING, STOP BRIBING, STOP PRETENDING, etc. Much of this work was quickly taped over by local Indian municipal authorities, which only goes to speak to his quick wit and effective strategy.
A fluid life, an impossible erasure
Straddling multiple discourses and standing on the brink of subversion, Kureshi embodied the contradictions inherent in the current state of graffiti and street art in India. His street interventions critiqued consumption, while his entrepreneurial work contributed to the creation of new forms of cultural industry. What stood out, however, was his ability to adapt to both forms of expression with élan, even as he maintained a distinction between his work as a designer and his identity as a graffiti writer, fluidly shifting between one and the other.
This is Commissioned Vandalism by Daku, India Art Fair, Okhla, Delhi, in 2015. | Photo Credit: St+Art India Foundation
In 2015, under his graffiti alias Daku, he painted This is Commissioned Vandalism on a road outside the India Art Fair, which attracts large crowds interested in both mainstream art and the alternative aesthetic of street art. His ability to flexibly navigate between his different artistic identities placed him in a unique creative vantage point. As Daku, he keenly understood the complexities and compromises within the practice of alternative art. As Hanif, he embodied the new-age creative professional who occupies a liminal position between art and commerce, embracing a post-subcultural approach to street art.
He was not only my primary ethnographic resource and the central case study for my PhD dissertation but also someone who engaged with research in deeply interventionist ways, attempting not to let his perspectives and preoccupations as a practitioner dictate his research inputs. Watching him work was to become witness to not just the clever performance of street art but also to the many contingencies of urban life in India that come to surround such a performance.
Swachh Bharat Mural by Painter Kafeel and St+Art India, Lodhi Colony, Delhi. | Photo Credit: Pranav Gohil
As I questioned him on his mainstreaming of graffiti as well as the economic-political instrumentalisation of street art, and conceptualised him as the new artist-citizen who owes his allegiance to a global identity, I realised he had his own limits as a street artist living in a neoliberal economy. One remembers that shortly after graffiti writer Daku’s guerrilla aesthetic tactics were noticed by the authorities, he established the parallel world of St+Art India, and it was thence that designer Hanif was seen doing projects in collaboration with the state. In 2016, Kureshi and St+Art India enrolled sign painter Kafeel, who works with HandPainted Type, to paint a mural titled Swachh Bharat in Lodhi Colony, marking the start of an official policy-driven tie-up between St+Art India and the Central government.
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Despite the differences we encountered in our views about the role of the street artist today, Hanif welcomed critique as subtly as he launched it in his art. His true achievement, however, certainly lay in having introduced to the Indian city the enduring possibility of play, and unlike many of his art pieces which were erased by the state, his career is an indelible mark carrying the impossibility of any erasure.
Sanchita Khurana is an assistant professor in English at Mata Sundri College for Women, University of Delhi. She holds a doctorate in art history and visual studies from JNU, New Delhi. Her PhD dissertation on the political economy of Indian street art studied the work and career of Hanif Kureshi.
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