How to avoid paying tribute
It is wonderful but ironic that the Maharashtra government has bought over the London home of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, because every afternoon for years after school the children of IES in Dadar head past his abandoned and dilapidated Hindu Colony home, in Rajgriha building.
It is but inevitable in a state in which the international airport is named after Chhattrapati Shivaji Maharaj, in whose name many a scholar and academic's face has been literally blackened by the militant fan following, but where his forts are in various states of decay, including the Raigad Fort, his erstwhile capital. This is expected to be offset by erecting a gigantic Rs 315cr statue of his in the sea.
But why should any government bother when it is easier for the state to rename a road APJ Abdul Kalam Marg than to focus on infrastructure and facilities for education and scientific temper in schools, which pays tribute to Kalam's contribution far more effectively. In fact, even a simple science scholarship, or a book fund for rural students in his name would be better tribute than a road on which the richest of India live.
So why do we build memorials, garland busts and paintings and rename institutions in the names of those we ostensibly revere? When ordinary people die, grandparents, or parents, they are said to "live on" in their children, in a gesture, a resemblance, a legacy of philanthropy, through work they did, or through a value or belief system. Many a child struggles to live up to those standards set, those shaping forces, even within their lifetimes. The carrying forward of moral legacies is taxing and difficult.
With mass political and social leaders, especially those who have set impossibly high standards of ethics or values, inventions, or achievements, their inheritors become a next generation of those who would occupy those very posts - drafters of amendments to constitutions, framers of policy, and would be reformers of social justice. To operate without a physical memorialisation is to leave themselves open to comparison as those who would carry forward the legacy. Abdul Kalam makes every succeeding president look like a spendthrift, Gandhi makes every less tenacious faster unto death seem frivolous, and Ambedkar makes every Dalit mover and shaker seem partisan and ignorant. Shivaji, his reforms, taxation policies, inclusiveness, bravado, make every succeeding ruler seem inept. It would be way too much work to begin to emulate, seem inspired, carry out works that symbolise what they stood for, or carry forward the reforms these men or women sparked off. This is why Rani Tarabai, who kept up the Maratha resistance against Aurangzeb, after Shivaji, is never spoken of. As she does not lend herself to valorisation, the only option that remains is to acknowledge the role of women in standing up to the Mughals and that would diminish the heroic macho bravado of her father-in-law. The substitution of tribute necessarily seeks qualities, anecdotes, that can be made bombastic enough to seem impossible to emulate. Kalam the minimalist, Shivaji the warrior, Gandhi the saint, and Ambedkar the egalitarian. In the exaggerated impossibility of their contributions lies the negation of our need to emulate them. How could anyone?
It is far easier to provide the country with a road, a statue, slap a name on the side of any building, and through that, pay tribute. It's tangible, it's visible, it can be made really large, and most importantly, the payment of that tribute comes with an expiration date. The job gets done. Except, it's not a tribute at all. What it is, is the avoidance of one.