Issue 09
STOP
By Caleb NeelonPhotos By Kurnal Rawat
Illustration By Cleon Peterson
A gigantic metropolis with up to 20 million citizens (depending on when you stop counting), Mumbai, India, with its fine harbor, is one of the five largest cities on Earth, as well as one of the most densely populated. On Mumbai’s streets, the chaos of street traffic in South Asia can be perfectly encapsulated in the activity of autorickshaws, the tiny, three-wheeled taxis careening everywhere.
Autorickshaws are well suited to city terrain: able to dart through the narrow spaces of Mumbai traffic, their open structure giving passengers alternate doses of fresh air and exhaust fumes. As they are smaller and cheaper than standard taxis and less prestigious to drive or to use, their clientele is generally working class. Unfortunately, the autorickshaws’ smaller size makes them all the more susceptible to getting the worst of any collision. Consequently, a practical safety message on their backsides has evolved the autorickshaw into something of a folk art medium.
As a kid, Mumbai-based photographer and designer Kurnal Rawat noticed that autorickshaws all had a hand-painted message on the back, just below the taillight: STOP. It fascinated him, and he began photographing the messages in all their typographic and stylistic variations. While there’s no law that says the message is a mandatory one, the practice has existed for so long that it might as well be.
However, it’s possible that the lack of regulation means that the STOP message has been able to turn into something of an art form with variation and style that might disappear if a law were to state it must look just so. “These signs are painted by roadside sign painters, usually the same guys who paint signboards for shops,” Rawat explains. “The painters are usually non-trained artists from low social classes trying to make a living using their skills,” much like the autorickshaw drivers themselves. As they do when creating the hand-painted signage so common throughout India, the STOP painters take the opportunity to get creative. The challenge, of course, is how to keep a single fourletter word interesting and visually arresting enough to get the driver behind an autorickshaw to hit the brakes at the appropriate time.
Beyond the sensible safety-first reason for the message, Rawat also feels that since “the artist gets full freedom to express their talent and concepts, and sometimes the driver gives a concept also, the signs are more like a style statement for the drivers to decorate the vehicle.” It becomes something of a style battle for the drivers and the painters, who talk out the letter structure and the kind of font and embellishments to be used. With such uniformity of medium (always on an autorickshaw) and in size (always roughly the same small scale), the bends, colors, and strokes of the letters are the only areas with room for creativity. Because the autorickshaws are uniformly black in color, the techniques used to paint the logos are similar. “The canvas is black, so the painters work in reverse. They paint the color of the letters first and then paint the negative area by using black paint. It’s an interesting approach which results in unusual type structures.” And hopefully, some timely braking as well.