Sign of the times

The signboards that once caught your attention are disappearing from a rapidly developing cityscape. Vishal Rawlley reports

If you pause at any point in the city of Mumbai and look around, you may notice that you are surrounded by hundreds of signage forms: signboards, billboards, hoardings, hand bills, posters, banners — some big, some small, some immense. The cityscape is one teeming “signscape”. But we hardly notice. Not that there is much to notice about the row of glow signs on every streetlight, a translite on every bus stop, huge hoardings at every traffic junction — advertisements attacking our attention from every vantage point. Sure, some teaser ad campaign, a new film poster or an investment offer will grab your eyeballs every now and then, but collectively these signs benumb us. And with so much traffic to negotiate and the clock hands racing along, we all move through the city with our eyes on our feet.

But do you notice the sign of Sputnik Dry Cleaners as the train approaches Marine Lines station, or the decrepit sign of the defunct Diana cinema while coming down the over-bridge across Mumbai Central, or the numerous elegant art deco fonts on buildings around Churchgate — seen from the vantage point of the double-decker bus, and the very bright and colourful taxi sticker letterings on all city cabs? Perhaps the signboard of one odd jewellry store, a barber’s saloon, a juice stall or a tailor shop in your neighbourhood has caught your attention. And who has not noticed the misspellings on menus painted on restaurant walls and services listed on the boards of automobile workshops?

What marks out these signs from the deluge of advertising that inundates us is their idiosyncratic character, their individual style, their inside joke, their innocent charm, their other-worldliness, the time era they evoke, the different cultural sensibility they refer to, and the ethos they encapsulate. Each of these signs is special and it is their individual uniqueness which collectively gives Mumbai its special charm. These signs speak of the history of the city, expressing its unique cultural traits and the aspirations of its heterogeneous population. Moreover, through such motifs the city expresses itself in its own words (so to speak), for all to see, rather than being patronisingly interpreted by the mass media, a cultural agency or an individual scholar.

The plethora of advertising that surrounds us on the other hand is pretentious, manipulative and imposing. In the last decade or so, Mumbai’s rich heritage of unique signage forms is being drowned out and being insensitively replaced by the massive influx of “outdoor media”. Along with the steel and glass corporate structures and shopping malls that are indiscriminately mushrooming at every neighbourhood, the assault of advertising media on the cityscape shall make our city unrecognisable.
Five years ago a project was set up just to counter this degradation of our “signscape”. This project endeavours to document all such examples of signage in Mumbai that reflect its unique character and thus preserve and propagate our “typographic heritage”. These photographs are catalogued in an online archive at www.typocity.com. Now some of these signs have already disappeared. Presented above is a photographic record of some of our deteriorating heritage.

Vishal Rawlley is a researcher on urban issues  

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