Drive through India and you are sure to see this.
These are India's trucks.
Most goods in India are transported by truck.
And as India's economy has grown trucks have become central to how the country does business.
But since they were introduced to India in the 1940s,
these trucks have become more than just commercial transportation, they've become a canvas.
This is truck art.
We are all about these colors, about these symbols, about these fun elements about
our superstitions, about the evil eye, all that stuff, and these things still matter to us.
Truck art is an Indian art form. It's a sort of mash up of visual motifs from
Indian culture, language, beliefs, and history. This assortment of color schemes
typefaces and symbols is on display all over India's highways making long drives
through India a sort of artistic experience.
They're also very personal. An expression of individual
tastes, values, and beliefs of those who spend thousands of hours behind the wheel.
I went to India and drove all over the country looking for these trucks.
I wanted to understand what's behind this peculiar art form, what motivates these
drivers and artists to turn something as functional and mundane as freight trucks
into a spectacle of culture and beauty.
This truck. It first came to British India during World War II.
The original brand of the truck was Bedford and they were originally designed to carry
military cargo, but after the British left they stuck around.
This same basic design inspired many of the commercial trucks that are on the road today in India.
There are now millions of these trucks on Indian roads.
For the millions of drivers who spend weeks away from home, the truck is their workspace,
their home, their place of worship as they traverse India's vast distances.
You know that a truck guy is actually spending a phenomenal amount of time on
the road, so for him this has to be his comfort zone,
his kind of space where he is comfortable and he can probably just feel at peace.
There's a whole industry dedicated to this art form.
Painters, many from the northern state of Punjab, have become experts at the style.
Punjab is one of the main centers of truck art.
They have a distinctive style that is hard for others to replicate.
I think the calligraphy that they use,
the way that they write, what they write, and the fact that it has come so
beautifully to become a 3d expression. I've had a bunch of students try to
replicate it. It's not the easiest thing to do.
Over the years truck art has naturally developed a set of unspoken style rules.
First, you have color.
Truck art almost always features bright, saturated colors.
You rarely see darks or neutrals.
They'll be a red on a blue, there will be a yellow, that is a constant and if you look at
the color palette that you usually use, you'll hardly find any black except for
shadow and fall over, you know highlighting certain areas, so they seem like they're elevated.
Next, you've got the typeface or the font, which for prominent words is
always put in English and rendered in this blocky 3d style, always hand-painted.
Most of the messages you see on the back of these trucks are messages of safety.
The most common counsel on the back of trucks admonishes drivers to honk their horn.
For truckers whose massive rigs have high blind spots,
it's a good safety practice to honk your horn if you plan
to pass a truck on the road but the car horn is also just how people communicate on the road here.
On the roads and in the cities, the car horn is a part of the landscape.
Yeah, they really take this horn mantra really seriously here.
Another important message you see is use dipper at night. The dipper is kind of the low beam
headlights and because these trucks are so up high the high beam headlights go
straight into their eyes and make it very dangerous.
And finally you've got the iconography, the symbols that adorn these vehicles.
Every truck is totally unique. A lot of the markings are functional, so you'll have the number of the truck,
you'll have different identifiers for the business,
but then the driver gets a say in the way it looks and so because of that you get
this medley of different styles. Some are religious some are national, but a lot of
these are symbols that the drivers just think look cool. There's this eagle
I keep seeing on all of the trucks and have asked a dozen of these truck
drivers whose trucks on this eagle and they can't really tell me what it means
or what it's for they just know that the other guy had it and it looks really cool.
And so it's good to remember that while a lot of this has deep symbolism,
some of it is just a cool trend and people are expressing themselves with
their truck in whatever way they want. Some experts think that this eagle might
represent speed and precision, but the trucker's in India's northern state of
Punjab think of this as a falcon alluding to their religious history,
A major theme here is religious symbolism. These truck drivers will put religious symbols
of different gods or gurus or important figures and there's a reason behind this.
Truck driving is not a safe profession. The truck drivers here are telling me that
sometimes they drive 24 hours straight without stopping. This is dangerous stuff
and these religious symbols can give them a sense of peace and safety while
they're away from their families and on the road for days or weeks on end.
They also have the cow and a calf, which is about fertility, it's about prosperity.
These are symbols that will be there on almost all of them.
A well decorated truck can mean a sense of pride for these drivers.
You see, it's just like a bride. They really put lots of flowers,
balloons, the works, all of it. Truck art can also represent a sense of
community and common culture for these workers, who are constantly moving around.
Truck art is an amalgam of different influences, old and new, religious and
secular, meaningful and trendy. It's an unlikely fusion of economics and art,
business and aesthetic. Trucks are the core of India's economy, but they're also
where some of the most beautiful art lives and moves.