Tek Bir Mukhiya: An artist who helped shape Nepal’s visual modernity

This paper was first presented during “Radical Printmaking in Asia,” a panel discussion for The Politics of Print: elephant in the room, staged in January 2026 as part of STPI’s annual Print Show & Symposium.

In the decades following the fall of the hereditary autocratic Rana regime in 1951, Nepal entered a period of immense political transformation and cultural reorientation. The end of the Rana era, which lasted just over one century, coincided with anticolonial movements across South Asia. India gained independence from British rule in 1947, as countries like Pakistan and Sri Lanka engaged in defining their own postcolonial identities.

In Nepal, the overthrow of the Rana dictatorship by a coalition between the Nepali Congress and the monarchy was initially framed as the beginning of democracy and modern nationhood. Yet this optimism was short-lived. In 1960, King Mahendra dissolved parliament and introduced the Panchayat system, establishing another centralised regime. Within this shifting landscape, the state advanced a powerful cultural ideology summarised in the slogan Ek Raja, Ek Desh, Ek Bhasa, Ek Bhesh, meaning: “One King, One Nation, One Language, One Dress.” Nepal’s immense linguistic, ethnic, and cultural diversity was to be streamlined into a singular national identity centred on the Nepali language and monarchy.¹ Art, literature, architecture and education became tools in this nation-building process. If Nepal was to be modern, it required modern images.

It was within this historical moment that Tek Bir Mukhiya emerged as one of the most significant yet understated figures in shaping Nepal’s visual modernity. Born in Kurseong near Darjeeling in India, Mukhiya spent his teenage years in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where he worked in production houses painting cinema posters and designing package labels. This environment was formative. Unlike academically trained fine artists, he learned through observation, collaboration and direct engagement with materials. Cinema poster workshops were spaces where typography, illustration, dramatic colour and layout coexisted within a hybrid aesthetic that blurred the boundaries between art and commerce. The skills he absorbed there—precision in lettering, sensitivity to scale, and the ability to communicate mood through colour—would later define his book cover designs in Kathmandu.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nepali state actively encouraged intellectuals living in India to return and help build the nation. One of the most influential voices in this movement was Nepali writer, revolutionary and political leader, Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala. Mukhiya attended one of Koirala’s speeches in India and was deeply moved by the call to return and contribute to a newly forming Nepal. The idea of participating in the making of a modern nation resonated, and a few years later, Mukhiya left India for Kathmandu.

At that time, the state was actively mobilising intellectuals through campaigns such as the Gaun Farka Abhiyan, or “Back to the Village” campaign, which travelled to diasporic hubs like Darjeeling, Banaras, and Calcutta. Writers, artists, and scholars were urged to participate in constructing a new Nepal. Scholarships were offered to students to study art and architecture in India, Pakistan, and even the Soviet Union. Sajha Prakashan, re-established in 1965 as Nepal’s national publishing house, became central to this project. Originally founded in 1913 under a different name during the Rana period, it had limited public access. In the post-Rana era, however, it became a primary platform for publishing literature in Nepali, reinforcing the state’s one language policy while also providing space for emerging writers. Much of the printing infrastructure remained transnational. Colour presses and offset machines were more advanced in India, and paper and texture sheets were often imported. Even so, Sajha functioned as a cultural nucleus.

After arriving in Kathmandu in the 1960s, Mukhiya initially worked at a printing press as printing supervisor before joining Sajha Prakashan as a chief artist, where his work unfolded within a paradox. Sajha Prakashan functioned partly as a vehicle for the state’s cultural consolidation, promoting Nepali language literature as a marker of national unity. At the same time, it became the platform for literary experimentation. In the 1960s, the Tesro Aayam, or “Third Dimension” movement, initiated in Darjeeling by writers such as Indra Bahadur Rai, Ishwar Ballav, and Bairagi Kainla, advocated for literature grounded in lived social and psychological realities rather than romantic imagination.² Many of these texts were published through Sajha.

Mukhiya’s covers became the visual counterpart to this literary modernism. Flat colour fields, abstraction, expressive geometry, and hand-rendered typography translated textual experimentation into graphic form. His covers did not merely package literature. They interpreted it. Over the next four decades, he designed more than a thousand book covers, visually defining modern Nepali literature for generations. Yet despite this vast output, he was rarely recognised as an artist. Categorised as a designer, his work was often viewed as commercial rather than artistic. This distinction between fine art and design shaped how his practice was understood within the larger art historical framework of Nepal.

To understand the significance of Mukhiya’s practice, it is essential to consider the material conditions of printing in Nepal from the 1960s through the early 2000s. In the early decades, block printing dominated. Each additional colour required a separate block, making multicolour printing expensive and labour intensive. As a result, many covers relied on mono or dual colour palettes. Mukhiya transformed this limitation into strength, using contrast, texture, and line to create depth and visual interest. Imported Normatone textured papers, routed through India from Europe, allowed subtle tonal variations without adding extra ink. Designers working in English could access Letraset dry transfer sheets with pre-designed Roman fonts, but for those working in Devanagari, such tools were largely unavailable.

Mukhiya had to draw his typography by hand.³ This necessity became an aesthetic opportunity. Each book title was lettered uniquely, responding to the tone of the text. The script itself became an image, its curvature and rhythm treated as compositional elements. What might have been a constraint instead produced a distinctive visual language rooted in touch and improvisation.

Mukhiya’s career maps directly onto shifts in printing technology. While early covers from the 1960s and 1970s reveal the tactile density of block printing, the introduction of offset printing in Kathmandu by the late 1980s expanded possibilities. Photographs could be integrated more easily, gradients became smoother, and compositions became more layered. One begins to see photographic portraits, including the artist’s own performative self-portraits, and more intricate arrangements.

When digital tools entered the design process in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mukhiya adapted once again. Using software functions such as liquify, he manipulated scanned drawings, creating fluid distortions and layered effects that were visually novel at the time. Sometimes, overwhelmed by deadlines, he would sketch spontaneously with crayons, scan the drawing, distort it digitally, and finalise a cover within hours. These digital experiments briefly influenced album covers and cassette designs in Nepal, reflecting how design trends circulated beyond the book.

Mukhiya moved residences several times before eventually finding a permanent home in Kathmandu. Because of these frequent relocations and limited storage space, he gave away, discarded, or threw away many of his designs and printed materials. Original artwork copies, design drafts, printing blocks, tools, and advertisement materials were lost over time. He even burned many of them. This makes archiving his work particularly challenging, since many original materials no longer exist. The lack of recognition he experienced as an artist also contributed to this fragile archive. In South Asia, commercial design has rarely been preserved with the same seriousness as painting or sculpture. Reconstructing his archive therefore requires working backward from the printed books themselves, to imagine drafts, blocks, and processes. The absence of materials becomes part of the narrative, revealing how histories of design are often fragmented or overlooked.

Although primarily known as a designer, Mukhiya remained deeply connected to Kathmandu’s art world. He exhibited paintings and maintained close relationships with modernist artists who had returned from India and other regions. Many covers incorporated stylistic dialogues emerging from studios and art institutions. When modernist painters established art schools and began teaching, their visual vocabularies, abstraction, expressionism, and symbolic figuration, filtered into Mukhiya’s designs. When his covers are laid chronologically side by side, they offer an informal visual history of Kathmandu’s artistic evolution.

Through Sajha Prakashan, Mukhiya’s covers entered schools, libraries and households. For many readers, the experience of literature was inseparable from his visual framing. The cover was not only a protective surface but also the first encounter with the text, shaping expectations and mood. His small signature, often a handwritten “mu” placed discreetly on the cover, captures this relationship between hand and print. Before the 1990s, each signature varied slightly in proportion because he drew it, each time. Later, his son, Samridh Mukhiya, scanned one version, standardising it across designs. This small shift reflects broader changes in reproducibility and authorship that accompany digital tools.

Through more than a thousand covers, Tek Bir Mukhiya constructed a visual archive of modern Nepali consciousness. His trajectory from Calcutta’s poster studios to Kathmandu’s publishing houses mirrors the movement of ideas and people that shaped post-Rana Nepal. His designs carry the imprint of ideological consolidation, literary experimentation, technological transition, and material improvisation.

To study his work is to read the intertwined histories of nation building, diaspora, print technology, and artistic negotiation. Though he worked on the surfaces of books rather than monumental canvases, those surfaces carried the imagination of a country seeking to define itself. In the quiet space between ink, paper and script, Mukhiya helped design modern Nepal.

This essay emerges from an ongoing archival research project being conducted with the archive of Tek Bir Mukhiya in collaboration with Kala Kulo and the Mukhiya family. It is part of a larger Nepal Modern Artists Archive project initiated by Kala Kulo, which seeks to contextualise and preserve the contributions of artists who shaped twentieth-century Nepali visual culture. Within this broader initiative, I have been working closely with designer Tek Bir ji’s archive, tracing his life, practice, materials, and the shifting technological and social landscapes through which he worked.

Images courtesy of Tek Bir Mukhiya, archived by Kala Kulo.