Mithu Sen, in collaboration with Sanyasi Lohar and his team, brings the Santali script into the landscape of a Santal village in a gesture that is both gentle and defiant. The work is not only a mural on mud walls; it is a reclamation, a reassertion of cultural identity in a world where linguistic invisibility has become a silent form of erasure. The mural draws from a heritage that recalls Santiniketan’s approach to art as public, communitarian, and transformative. It echoes this tradition but speaks in a distinct and deeply personal voice. It is composed of Ol Chiki script, the written form of the Santali language developed by Raghunath Murmu, filling the village walls with symbols that are at once familiar and subversive. It asks viewers to reflect on the quiet violences that erasure enacts on languages and cultures, the generations of forgetting that shape identities in the shadows.
