14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Kerala students sketch vibrant tribute to Basheer's legacy
PALAKKAD: In the open courtyard of Sreekrishnapuram Higher Secondary School, a remarkable wall has come to life. Not with bricks or cement but with imagination, stories, and ink. Stretching 24 feet wide and soaring 15 feet high, a wall stitched from cloth and soaked in black acrylic sketches, has become a living tribute to one of Kerala's greatest literary voices – Vaikom Muhammad Basheer.
Titled 'Varakondoru Kottamathil' (A Castle Wall of Drawings), this installation is a collective meditation on Basheer's world, brought alive by the hands of 75 student-artists, all armed with brushes, black paint, and a deep reverence for the 'Beypore Sultan'.
Organised as part of the Basheer Remembrance Week by the school's student groups Vidyarangam Kala Sahithya Vedi and Varappada Arts Club, the wall was envisioned as a canvas where literature meets lines. The instructions were minimal: choose your favourite characters, dive into Basheer's world, and reimagine it in monochrome. What followed was a creative outpouring – 100 detailed sketches that are as expressive as they are stark, each drawn with striking restraint using only black lines on cloth.
Walk past the wall, and you'll see Abu's wide-eyed innocence, Pathumma's fierce simplicity, Majeed's longing, Suhara's silence. You'll meet Ottakkannan Pokkar and Mandan Muthappa, figures etched in literary folklore now reborn in bold, youthful strokes. The sketches aren't just portraits, they are distilled emotions. Sometimes humorous, sometimes melancholic, but always honest.
'The students have managed to capture not only the characters but also the mood, the rhythm, and the soul of Basheer's writing,' Vibin Nath T K, the school's art teacher and mentor behind the project, tells TNIE.
