Wall As a Public Space
“To read public space only as a spatial condition, as a matter of square footage, zoning, or physical access, is to miss half the picture.”
—Reshma Esther Thomas

We begin not at the park bench, not at that vacant land, but at the wall.

The wall is easy to overlook in conversations about public space; it is, after all, the boundary of something else: the edge of a building, a road’s margin, or even a flyover’s underside. We look past it to the square or the street. But the wall has always been doing something: holding, diving, or announcing. It is never simply neutral. And in the city of Hyderabad, in the years following the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh into Telangana in 2014, the wall has become one of the most charged surfaces in the city: a canvas onto which questions of ownership, belonging, and public identity are being quietly and sometimes violently projected.

In Hyderabad, the pillars holding the flyovers and the metro, in recent years, have been transformed. Cheriyal paintings adorn these concrete columns across the city. These paintings, in varying sizes, display processions of women carrying pots, festive scenes from Bonalu (a traditional festival centred on the Hindu goddess Mahakali from Telangana), and figures drawn from Telangana folk traditions; some even go beyond the cultural aspects, showcasing animals or our sportspeople. 

At first glance, this looks like beautification, but a closer look at it reveals something more complicated.

Cheriyal painting is traditionally a cloth scroll-based art form, rendered in natural pigments derived from seashells and other organic materials, used historically to narrate stories from the Indian mythology by the Kaki Podagollu bards, a storytelling community, for audiences in rural Telangana. 

Today, what appears on the flyover pillars is not quite a Cheriyal painting. The natural dyes have been replaced with poster and acrylic colours. The scroll has given way to the concrete column. The hand of the traditional Cheriyal artist, trained in a specific visual grammar over generations, has been substituted with that of commercial signage painters, hired through an advertising ecosystem rather than a craft lineage. While the visual form has been retained, the body of knowledge it carries has been hollowed out.

The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation’s (GHMC) ‘City Art Scape‘ initiative, operated under its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) arm, formalised this process into a portal. Citizens and organisations could donate money to have a wall in the city painted. They could choose the location. They could choose the artist from a pre-approved list of painters, all from established commercial art companies. What they could not choose was the subject of the painting. That decision, the GHMC portal made clear, rested with the local body itself.

Here, in the fine print of a civic portal, is the anatomy of public space at work. The wall is very casually opened; citizens are invited to participate, to fund, and even to select. But the content of the wall, what image the city wears on its surface, remains a government prerogative. The public is offered the illusion of participation (when they contribute the money and select a wall/who paints it). The state retains the authorial voice.

A closer look at what is being painted reveals that it is not a random visual imagery connected with the city. The subjects—Cheriyal scroll imitations, Bonalu processions, scenes from rural Telangana, the Charminar, the Golconda Fort—are a deliberate political vocabulary. Hyderabad, newly claimed by Telangana following the 2014 bifurcation, found itself in an identity crisis, especially now that the city was the capital of newly-formed Telangana and not Andhra Pradesh.

A city of one crore people simultaneously became a city that needed to articulate a local self. The wall became the medium for that articulation. The heritage of Telangana was painted onto the infrastructure. The flyover pillar, that most mundane of civic objects, became a vehicle for cultural assertion.

But then one wonders, whose culture? And who was authorising the assertion?

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard described the simulacra as a copy that either had no original or that no longer has an original—a copy that no longer refers back to its origin, but circulates as its own reality. The Cheriyal-style paintings on Hyderabad’s flyovers are, in this precise sense, simulacra. They evoke an art form without practising it. They reference a tradition without sustaining it. They do not commission the masters of Cheriyal or Nirmal; they commission commercial painters who replicate the aesthetic. The cultural referent exists not to honour a living tradition but to signal one to say: this city has roots, this city has heritage, this city belongs to Telangana.

This is the simulacra as civic branding. And the wall is where it is most legible.

What makes this interesting and troubling in the context of public space is that the wall has historically been one of the few surfaces available to those without institutional power. Graffiti, political murals, protest slogans: these are the languages of those who cannot access official channels of spatial production. The wall was, for a long time, a surface that the state could not fully control; the wall was something that could be reclaimed overnight, that could speak without permission. The GHMC initiative does something specific to this. It bureaucratises the wall; it draws the surface into an authorisation framework. 

By establishing a portal, a pre-approved list of artists, and government control over content, it transforms the wall from a potentially insurgent public surface into a managed one.

When a state government uses that inescapably public surface to project a particular cultural identity—one that is, in Hyderabad’s case, also a political claim about which state this city truly belongs to—it is doing something that goes beyond beautification. It is shaping what the city looks like. It is constructing a public self. 

To read public space only as a spatial condition, as a matter of square footage, zoning, or physical access, is to miss half the picture. The public also lives in what appears on signage, on screens, on the surfaces we move past every day without quite registering.