A 200-metre lettering specimen
Notes on hand-painted lettering
A few weeks ago, I spotted a roughly 200-metre stretch of painted Tamil lettering on a wall in the bylanes of Perungudi in Chennai — one of many that have survived crackdowns by city officials for the removal of political graffiti.
It was the flashes of fluorescent colours that caught my eye first, and I stopped to photograph it. I was met with a few curious glances by passers-by for whom this may be an ordinary, everyday sight of little significance. What caught my attention was not only the vivid colours but the variety of lettering styles. As someone interested in these subjects and learning the Tamil script, I was curious.
The lettering is painted in the black (top half) and red (bottom half) of the commissioning party’s colours, with a consistent fluorescent yellow outline. Most characters are at least 2 feet tall — a display in every sense of the word. The background looks like a gradient from a distance, with new colours blending together every few metres: pink and purple to blue and green to yellow and ochre, applied in broad hatching strokes that you might notice only up close. Red, black, and fluorescent yellow remain the most visible elements through sheer size, while the background colours ensure that the stretch reads as a continuous visual scene.
Some of the lettering uses thick, monolinear strokes with very little contrast, sometimes paired with the popular slanting style of handwritten Tamil. One detail that I found interesting was the loops of the stylised ே — the secondary vowel sign for the long ‘e’ — that don’t fully close (leaving a gap that brings to mind the State Bank of India logo).
Then there are wide letters — some with sharp cuts at the corners, looking like ink traps of digital typefaces that help contain ink during printing, and others with rounded corners that soften the same structure.
In some panels, stroke endings of characters are reminiscent of serifs in Latin typefaces, an indication that these artists are working within and responding to a much wider visual environment. These endings are especially prominent at the end of the extended swash-like stroke and the top bar of the ர / ‘ra’. The style of characters in the second line show a different approach — smoother, tapered endings.
I particularly like these playful marker-like letterforms with softer curves.
The detail I found most fascinating is the variation in the pulli: ் — the diacritic dot typically placed above Tamil characters to mute the inherent vowel sound, equivalent to the pollu ్ in Telugu or the virama in other Indian scripts.
Across this short stretch, the pulli appears in at least five different forms: a circle, a half-circle, an irregular hexagon, a stretched rounded rectangle, a flat oval disc. Each painter seems to have their own version of this one small mark, adjusted to fit the overall lettering style of their panel.
The lettering was commissioned from Devi Arts, one of what I assume are several agencies doing this kind of work. Their name appears on one of the last panels, but the individual painters remain unknown (I couldn’t find much about them online, but that’s an enquiry for another day). The range of lettering styles and colour combinations, while staying consistent with the party’s broader visual language, makes the wall something of a specimen sheet — a portfolio of one group of artists, on display across 200 metres.
I should also acknowledge my own position in making these observations: I work in design and research visual culture and typography, and I am not a native speaker or reader of Tamil. I see this wall as a record of considerable skill and imagination; local residents or civic authorities may see it as a nuisance or public defacement. As a resident of Tamil Nadu who cannot vote in state elections (I vote in my home state Telangana), I am aware that the painted text is campaign propaganda but my relationship to its politics is indirect — I am not the ideal audience for the message this wall wants to convey. My engagement is also skewed: I read the lettering as a visual object first and process the message second. The pace of these two activities is very different, and the gap between them is not neutral. How much does a person’s relationship to the script, the politics, or the location shape what they notice here?
This wall has no portraits of political leaders or other graphics that typically feature prominently in this kind of political lettering. Their absence means the lettering becomes the image itself. The Latin-serif stroke endings are one indication that hand-painted lettering as a tradition is in a constant state of flux, with the boundaries between lettering, typography and script always porous. It is an ongoing exchange that runs in both directions: the same political parties use digital Tamil typefaces inspired by hand-lettering traditions for their print and digital campaigns. Lettering artists absorb formal conventions from typography, and typeface designers in turn borrow from hand-lettering practice. The evolution is not linear, and this wall is a small record of it.