The last hoarding painters of Vijayawada

An afternoon at the Eluru Road studios with the men who still mix lead-white into kerosene, and what their argument with the digital press tells us about a country in too much of a hurry.

The first thing Govinda Rao does when a new banner arrives is forget it is a movie. He turns the rolled-up canvas, twelve feet across, against the studio wall on Eluru Road, takes a stick of charcoal, and sketches the hero's jaw in two strokes — not as a face yet, but as weight. The face will come later, after the sky, after the gold leaf around the crown, after the smudged crimson behind the heroine's veil. The painting begins, he says, where the eye will eventually land last.

Crimson, gold, and the argument with the press

Govinda is seventy-one. He has painted hoardings since 1968, when the Vijayawada theatres still ordered fresh boards for every Friday release and a six-man crew could finish a Pathala Bhairavi banner in three nights of paraffin lamplight. The press machines, he tells me without looking up, arrived in 1997. Within four years the order book at his guild was halved. By 2014 there were nine painters left in the city; today, after the pandemic, there are four.