Honk Please, Art ahead
- Clock It
- May 11
- 4 min read
When most art is found in galleries, we ignore the creative expression we see day to day. It travels right next to us; truck art. Its bold, colourful and filled with history.
By- Saanvi Mohan
If you’ve ever travelled on Indian highways, you’ve definitely seen trucks bursting with colour, personality, and emotion, often impossible to ignore even in heavy traffic. What many people don’t realise, though, is that truck art in India didn’t begin as a design concept at all. In the early to mid-20th century, as road transport expanded and trucks became essential to trade and movement, painting on vehicles started primarily for practical reasons. Instructions like “Horn Please” or “Use Dipper at Night” helped drivers communicate safely on narrow roads. Company names identified cargo, while religious symbols were painted, offering protection against the unpredictability of long journeys. Over time, those functional markings began to shift.
Borders turned decorative, lettering became expressive, and colours grew bolder. ‘Truck art added colour and life to those dull roads; it made the world seem brighter and more colourful,’ says Avanish Mohan, 46, COO at Radio Zindagi. He recalls sitting in the backseat during long highway drives as a child, watching a bright blue truck ahead painted with red flowers, a pair of large eyes, and the words “Horn OK Please.” As the truck swayed through traffic, he kept staring at the details and found himself wondering about the person who painted it, an artist whose work travelled miles across highways, yet whose name he would probably never know.
By the 1960s through the 1990s, local sign painters and folk artists began incorporating regional craft motifs and imagery,bright marigold garlands, blooming lotuses, strutting peacocks, roaring tigers, and flying eagles. Bollywood stars like Amitabh Bachchan sometimes appeared beside patriotic symbols such as the Indian flag, while witty phrases like ‘Horn OK Please’ or ‘Buri Nazar Wale Tera Muh Kala’ added humour and poetry. Spiritual symbols like Om, Ganesha, and protective eyes were also commonly painted to bless and safeguard the journey. There’s something beautifully democratic about this art form: it wasn’t created for galleries or critics but for public roads, visible to anyone who happened to be behind it. It exists without elitism and often, it’s made by people who don’t identify as artists at all, yet shape one of the most recognisable visual cultures of the country.
“India’s moving galleries were never built for museums, they were built for the road.” says Pearl Mohan, 19, a psychology student studying in Delhi University.
“Long road trips used to bore me alot as a kid, but my sister and I turned it into a game, we’d read the truck quotes out loud and try guessing what the next one would say. Somehow those lines made the journey feel shorter. We used to wonder what buri nazar wale tera muh kala, meant” Pearl Mohan, 19, a psychology student studying in Delhi University. Lines like “Buri Nazar Wale Tera Muh Kala,” “Maa Ka Ashirwad,” or even just that painted eye looking back aren’t random decorations. They come from real feelings like wanting protection, missing home, trying to stay okay while constantly on the road. A lot of truck drivers spend weeks away from family, eating, sleeping, and living mostly on highways. So the truck slowly becomes more than just a vehicle.The motifs are not just a familiar presence for the drivers but for everyone travelling on that road. Pearl added that those symbols were her companions on the journey just as much as they were for the drivers.
Today, traditional hand-painted truck art exists alongside many changes. Vinyl stickers, digital printing, and corporate branding have replaced much of the handmade work once seen on almost every highway truck. But its influence hasn’t disappeared it has simply moved into new creative spaces. Fashion designer Manish Arora, for example, has drawn inspiration from street culture, including truck art, using bold colours, kitschy motifs, and playful typography in his collections. “I loved how Manish Arora brought truck-art energy into
fashion,” says Neha Mohan, 42, a fashion designer based in Delhi. “The loud colours and playful motifs felt nostalgic but fresh like something I grew up seeing on highways suddenly becoming something I could wear.” Beyond fashion, truck-art aesthetics now appear in many other creative spaces. In advertising, brands like Fevicol have used truck-art style lettering and humour in their campaigns. At festivals such as NH7 Weekender brightly painted truck panels and signboards often appear as stage décor and photo backdrops. Cafés like Social sometimes use “Horn OK Please” signage, floral borders, and colourful truck-style graphics on their walls and menus. Graphic designers and illustrators also borrow the style for posters, album covers, and packaging, using its bold colours and hand-painted typography. Even if fewer trucks are fully hand-painted today, the visual language continues to live on in design and popular culture.
The next time you find yourself behind a brightly painted truck on a highway, it might be worth pausing for a moment instead of just overtaking. Read the words, notice the symbols, observe the colours. Sometimes the most honest art isn’t hanging in galleries, it’s moving beside us, carrying goods, stories, memories, and fragments of human expression across the country.
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