How everyday Kerala is being reimagined in an award-nominated illustration series
Mohammed Sajid’s ongoing illustration series, People of Kerala, celebrates the easily overlooked yet inevitable characters who populate the invisible parts of his hometown: the urban areas of Kerala. From flower vendors to fishmongers, security guards and street sweepers, the subjects in the Bengaluru-based artist’s works stare intently at the viewer.
They are surrounded by objects, smells, words and tools that define their daily lives. Instead of letting them fade into the background, Sajid gives them names, identities and stories.
Muhammed Sacid | Photo Credit: SPECIAL EDITING
The second edition of the series is currently in contention for the AOI World Illustration Awards 2026, one of the world’s most prestigious illustration competitions. It consists of eight portraits: a tea maker, a security guard, a tailor, a street sweeper, a fish seller, a coconut worker, a postman and a flower seller.
Born from what Sajid describes as “homesickness,” it highlights people he encounters every day but rarely pays close attention to. He moved to Bengaluru after graduating in Design and Applied Arts from Kerala College of Fine Arts in Thiruvananthapuram in 2015. The transition and pace of city life led him to take a closer look at the communities he left behind.
Sreedharan – Whisperer from the People of Kerala | Photo Credit: SPECIAL EDITING
“I felt like people in Bengaluru were hesitant to smile. Even when they smiled, I felt different,” says Sajid, who hails from Perambra in Kozhikode. “I grew up in a community where we knew everything about our neighbors.”
Maalukutty – Street Sweeper from the People of Kerala | Photo Credit: SPECIAL EDITING
Created in 2018, the first Folks of Kerala series was heavily inspired by Indian folk aesthetics. Teal tones were used to depict skin tones, and the portraits offered only minimal contextual information through their environments. The series of 13 illustrations emerged from Sajid’s desire to create something “familiar yet unique”. But the project also left him creatively exhausted.
“I gave it up because of exhaustion,” he recalls.
An example from the first Kerala Friends series | Photo Credit: SPECIAL EDITING
The series was revived in 2025 with a more layered approach. “This time, I surrounded the subjects with objects and words associated with them. After completing the portraits, I gave them names and back stories. The color palette and contrast are also different,” he says.
New works tend toward realism, especially in depictions of dark skin and facial features. They also embrace a vibrant, pop art-inspired visual language. The compositions are unapologetically maximalist; It’s full of typography, objects, gridlines, and design marks.
“The lines and dots were added as a challenge for the AI to copy the work I was doing,” says Sajid. “Using AI to create art in our style is unacceptable to me as an artist. Some may view these marks as crude work, but they are also a nod to my training as a design student.”
Sajid is no stranger to high-profile illustration work. In 2019, the actor designed Google’s doodle marking Madhubala’s 84th birth anniversary, depicting her iconic role as Anarkali. Mughal-e-Azam (1960). For the artwork, he reinterpreted the CMYK color palette to evoke the visual language of the film’s period.
Google’s Doodle celebrating actor Madhubala’s 84th birth anniversary by Muhammad Sajid | Photo Credit: SPECIAL EDITING
The vitality of his work, he says, stems from Kerala itself.
“When I grew up in Kerala, temple festivals were explosions of color. The trucks on our roads, the posters at bus stops, even the pictures next to car license plates; nothing can be suppressed,” he says.
But his first artistic influence was much closer to home. “I remember painting sessions with my mother when I was little. Even though our religion discouraged us from reading, she would secretly draw portraits of actors on magazine covers. There was also a mural painted by her in my third-grade classroom: coconut trees, bodies of water, and a landscape.”
Sajid jokes that he became an artist after realizing that science was not his profession.
There is no rush for the next addition to Folks of Kerala. “I started doing these works to escape the monotony of daily life,” he says. “I don’t want to force myself to create them. I’ll make them when I feel like it.”
Mohammed Sajid’s works are shared on Instagram @muhammedsajid.n.
It was published – 17 June 2026 08:00 IST
