With graffiti, GB Road tries image makeover

NEW DELHI: A quiet movement has taken root in one corner of GB Road, Delhi’s infamous red light district, in collaboration with local sex workers. Its goal is to change the way ordinary people view this road. It’s also to allow sex workers, who almost never leave the brothels during daytime, to express themselves.
For the first time, walls here are being given over to graffiti made by the sex workers, their children and street artists from India and abroad.
The idea for painting the walls came from a three-year-old child of a sex worker. “We were painting the school and a student asked if we could clean up the walls in our area. So we thought about it for a while and finally decided to paint something on the walls so that they don’t get vandalized the moment we clean them,” said Narendra Pandey of Kat-Katha, an NGO for the welfare of sex workers and their children.
The team then got thinking about the pictures they would paint on the walls and consulted the sex workers in the area who provided them with ideas. There is a portrait of a woman clad in various colours, which is basically how a sex worker is telling the world what she is exactly missing in her life. Another shows a woman guiding her child by her hand to the school.
In a different parts of the city, Harsh Raman Singh Paul, a street artist, simultaneously conceived the idea of WoW—Walls of Women. The project was intended to let women express themselves and “reclaim their space in life”. “What better place to start this project than GB Road where women are conspicuously absent from routine life?” says Raman.

Soon, graffiti artists from all over the world started getting in touch with him to collaborate on the project. “One day, a three-girl crew from Germany—Ara Peng—flew straight to the place and we started working on a wall immediately. They started talking to the sex workers and came up with the idea of a tigress and a child,” said Raman.
At other places, Raman and the Kat-Katha team asked sex workers and their children to drop colours down their terrace. The effect was akin to several rainbows on the grimy walls of the house. Many such rainbow walls can now be seen in the area.
Street artists working on GB Road’s walls talk about the initial resistance from locals who mistook the artists for vandals. By the end of the first wall, Raman says sex workers watching them rushed out to greet them with tears in their eyes.
“It was a beautiful experience. It didn’t feel like GB Road. The women, who don’t leave their brothels very often, were out on the roads with us in broad daylight,” he said. The next installation in WoW on GB Road will be done by Anpu, one of the few female street artists in the country.
“Internationally, graffiti is seen as vandalism, but here we are taking that and converting it into something positive. We want to paint all of GB Road,” Raman says.