Understanding the politics behind erecting statues
One of the first games Indian children learn to play in school is "statue". It’s a simple game that requires no resources. As soon as one person says “statue”, the other person has to stop in their tracks and freeze, until one is “un-statued”. In the game, the one giving the command is the winner; the one who becomes the statue, thus passing into transient immortality, is the loser.
In a way, what this teaches us is that no one willingly wants to become a statue. It is the others who so desire.
Statues are static and boring. By making a statue tall and oversized, we try and make them less boring. There is the unmissable conceit: a man can be turned into a towering figure by casting him in stone and bronze. It is a way of escaping the dwarfism intrinsic to mortality.
Set in stone
Then we have something like Madame Tussauds where the material used is wax and the figures are known for their life-like quality. Realism rather than height is the more important goal. One doesn’t have to be dead to make it. The contemporary celebrity is given her due in her lifetime.
Indian statue makers tend to get stuck in clichés. Vivekananda, for instance, is always portrayed hands clasped across the chest. Netaji Bose’s one hand is, at all times, airborne.
Gandhiji is always with his walking staff or dandi. In Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August, in a fictional north Indian small town, there’s a statue of Gandhi which is in disrepair. It is falling down, propped up by a stick that is almost going into its back. It becomes a metaphor for what we have done to Gandhi and his vision. As Akhil Sharma writes in his introduction to the New York Review Books Classics edition of the novel, in Indian town squares, “often the statue is sculpted so blockily that Gandhi looks like a muscle-bound wrestler with glasses and a shaved head”.
Post-independence, Indian towns started installing statues at busy chowks, some more than others. Once when I met Sunil Khilnani in London, he remarked that Allahabad was a lovely town with a lot of statues. It struck me that this was true, just that as someone who was growing up there, one didn’t notice them. One was too busy trying to get oneself and one’s bicycle safely across the crowded chowks. A busy intersection might not be the best place to affix a statue: no one has the time to stand and stare.
Pomp and show
At least the Statue of Unity won’t suffer from this drawback. Set up more like a theme park, in the middle of nowhere, it will play the role Modi envisages. Of course, it’s politics, and the politics is well known, but we have to accept that it will appeal to Modi’s base, just as Trump does to his.
One does think about the obscene amount of money invested, the displaced people on whose land it was built. With any big monument, one thinks about the blood, sweat, tears and lives of the people who spent years toiling on it, all to cement the legacy of one person. Many of the labourers were Chinese; one wonders what their experience was like, working far away from home.
No immortality
Let’s also not forget that statues and portraits are contentious for both the Left and the Right. What goes up can come down. One’s posthumous memory is in the hands of the capricious living.
Lenin’s statues were pulled down in Kerala after the democratic demise of the communist rule. Ambedkar’s statues have been desecrated. The Bamiyan Buddhas were blasted by the Taliban. Over in Oxford, Aung San Suu Kyi’s alma mater St Hughes has removed her portrait and put it in storage because of her Rohingya policy. First, they put you on a pedestal; then they pull you down.
Rhodes Must Fall was a movement that began in Pretoria in 2015. The original target was a statue of Cecil Rhodes that stood in the University of Capetown. The movement spread to Oxford, where students demanded that a bust of his be removed. The Rhodes Scholarship though has been a source of funding and prestige for generations of international students. In the end, the statue wasn’t removed.
The former director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Roy Strong, said, “Once you start rewriting history on that scale, there won't be a statue or a historic house standing... The past is the past. You can’t rewrite history.” Similarly, Charlottesville in America saw deadly protests last year over plans to remove white supremacist Robert Lee’s statue. At one point it was covered with a shroud, then the shroud was ordered to be removed.
I’m a humble hack. I don’t have grand visions of the after-life. But if possible, I’d like to be remembered as lounging in the Press Club lawn, a glass of Kingfisher in one hand and a Goldflake in the other. This doesn’t have to be a statue; it can be a colourful nightly virtual/visual projection, which will vanish once the switch is turned off.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)