A warm welcome to the College of Fine Arts at Thiruvananthapuram. Whether you come from Kerala, from elsewhere in India, or from beyond the country, you arrive at a school that has stood on the same ground at Palayam for more than a century and has watched the city grow around it.

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The College keeps a long memory. Its present form dates to 1976, when the School of Arts was upgraded to a college and formally inaugurated, an act that redefined our sense of scale and ambition. The history beneath that date is older and more ambivalent. In mid-nineteenth-century Travancore, among its guilds and workshops, a carved ivory throne was dispatched to the Crystal Palace in London in 1851. The glare of imperial attention translated the knowledge of hands into an object that travelled further than its makers. That moment gave us visibility and a problem. It showed the world our skill, and it taught us how easily skill can be staged for someone else's story. The School of Industrial Art, founded in 1888, arose to formalise what communities already knew. It codified methods, named disciplines, and imported pedagogies that prized replication over experimentation. When the College was reborn in the 1970s, it had to unlearn some of that certainty. The early decades of degree education here were not smooth. They were formative because they were contested. Students insisted that studios be more than rooms, that libraries be more than storage, that the syllabus acknowledge the living world outside its pages. Dissent, then, was a kind of study conducted in depth.

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We carry that energy now, with responsibilities of our own. The present art world is efficient at converting attention into currency. It prefers speed, visibility, and the light sheen of consensus. Against consensus, we choose conversation. The College remains a place where processes and methods survive: drawing that rewires the act of seeing, sculpture that teaches weight and resistance, design that reinterprets what a purpose withholds, inquiries that return to archives and come back with questions rather than cash and trophies. We are not in want of opportunities. To choose them wisely, and to find another way to situate our practice, is the harder and more necessary task. It can lead you inside history, inside publics, inside other languages of form. Walk there often, borrow its weather, and let your work stay porous to what you read and watch and overhear.

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A school of art has to sort its values continually. Fame is quick, insight is slow. Spectacle is legible at a glance, meaning asks to be carried. The work you make here should make room for the minor gesture, the small, exact movement that does not beg to be seen but refuses to be erased. Minor does not mean lesser. It is the scale at which experiments survive long enough to become methods. Some of our alumni have found recognition and some have chosen to work outside its circuits. Both routes endorse the same ethic, which is to make work that is necessary to your thought, not obedient to fashion. The task before us is to reattach critique to care, and to keep the failures that teach what winning cannot.

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Thiruvananthapuram is a wonderful place to learn to see. Kerala built its public life on progressive thought, on a defence of free expression, and on a literacy so widespread that reading became an ordinary civic habit rather than a privilege. The reading publics here are real; so is the appetite for argument. People follow politics closely, hold their institutions to account, and carry a secular temper into daily life. The same public ethic shows in the care taken over health and over the cleanliness of shared space. You will be making work for an audience that is informed, attentive, and unafraid to disagree, and that is among the better conditions an artist can ask for.

The College sits inside this culture. Palayam, where it has stood since 1888, is one of the clearest images of coexistence the state can show: a mosque, a church, and a temple stand within a short walk of one another, sharing the same streets without friction. The institutions that keep the city's intellectual and civic life in motion are its neighbours. The headquarters of the University of Kerala and the State Central Library are close by, as are the Napier Museum and the Sri Chitra Art Gallery, the Kerala Science and Technology Museum, and the State Legislative Assembly. All within walking distance.

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The College asks this of you. Do not confuse obscurity with depth. Be hospitable to influence and ruthless with your own clichés. Keep your studio alive with questions. Revisit the things around you as a way to imagine futures that are not copies of the present. If the wider landscape rewards the loud and the large, choose a different way, one of precision, courage, and continuity. Your relevance will not be measured by the spectacle you can stage, but by the forms of thought and making you are able to sustain.

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Quietly, stubbornly, together.​