Till we deal with falsification and denials of history tellers, the politics and debates around building statues will continue to gather steam
Author Lew Wallace had once said, “The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.” Yet, from the momentous zeal of their commemoration, they get easily bronzed over with layers of interpretation that settle one over the other till the curated gleam is gone. Then they descend into the heat and dust of everydayness, becoming a part of the gush of life that doesn’t really care what they stand for or not. And they end up being a scaffolding of life itself, a perch for natural life forms, a sheltering shadow for refugees who have nowhere to go and a landmark for people to map their journeys with. This is the fundamental truth of extraordinary efforts that in the end become ordinary statistics.
Yet statues have a visual narrative that nobody in the world can unstring themselves from. They are the most visible markers of our civilisational history, from the Egyptian pyramids to the Bamiyan Buddhas. And their unshakeable giganticism seeks to transcend time and space, sometimes imprinting themselves, at other times encroaching on collective consciousness. They even acquire a spiritual aura as a repository of collective faith. Do we really then need statues in an information age? Yes, because there is no scale-flexing in a flat world of digital uniformity. So we want to stand out more in the physical world. This explains why the Chinese demolished the status of the Statue of Liberty as the tallest with its Buddhist statue at Henan and India toppled that with its Statue of Unity dedicated to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, never mind if Buddha is India’s most successful export to China or that the Patel statue has Chinese bronze. Both examples of shining human endeavour and might, they gentrify the appreciation of it in the process…we have it, you don’t. Even making the digital plane subservient to them.
In fact, statues continue to be a focal point of posturing and messaging. One just has to go back to the viral images of an African-American woman climbing and clinging to the skirts of the Statue of Liberty, protesting against US President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and police trying to talk her down. That image was the most potent reminder of what the American nation was born of and stood for, an instant reckoner of history and its obfuscation too. If there was collective amnesia about the essence of the proverbial American dream, one unremarkable woman could get that back by courting at the feet of the Statue of Liberty. Simply because it was there to anchor history in the first place. What could be a tokenism turned into a milestone on a civilisational timeline.
That explains the current swirl of opinionating on the statue on the banks of the Sabarmati at Kevadiya in Gujarat. And perhaps in a post-truth world, myth-making becomes easier with statues embodying the viewpoint of the story-teller. In that sense, statues, museums and public monuments are mutual extensions of each other, offering a manicured version of history as well as encouraging its dissidence in the public space. So for critics questioning the delayed iconisation of Sardar Patel as an appropriation of his legacy for political mongering by the ruling BJP, fact remains that it was necessary to rescue him from his relative anonymity in the Congress annals. Yes, he was the architect of the modern republic as we know it today, uniting the impossible princely states and tackling internal emergencies and Kashmir with a deft hand. In that sense he was a true nationalist. However, out of the Gandhi-Nehru aura, he drifted to the right end of the Congress spectrum and therefore, policy-wise, found a resonance in today’s BJP, which is positing itself as his rescuer in history and Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a fellow Gujarati appropriating the good intentions of a “son of the soil” like himself. The BJP may not end up practising Patel’s ideologies as such but the fact remains that the statue was a historical necessity of sorts too amid a plethora of commemorative plaques, platitudes, busts and memorials.
Statues around the world have been installed and dethroned in this continuous process called revision of history. Be it the desecration of the Confederate statues in the US or the tumble of Lenin-Stalin shrines with the collapse of Communism, or the neo-reclamation of BR Ambedkar and other Dalit icons by a flurry of monoliths commissioned by BSP chief Mayawati, all seem to harp on the need to archive and document history as is and not its coloured versions. It’s for the same reason that the busts of Bengal revolutionaries continue to be venerated in that state, once by the Left and now by the Trinamool Congress, simply because they do not find due space in the Congress-dominated retelling of our story of Independence. And even if there’s inclusivity in texts and recorded material, truth is there cannot be denial in the public space, which ought to allow democratic discourse, one where everybody can find a resonance, can invest his identity and claim a stake. Such cooption and acceptance of ideas will, therefore, for some time to come, rest with public monuments. And perhaps when every ship finds a lighthouse, will we wake up to our full potential as an eclectic culture. Right now, we are in the process of historical correction and still quite a long way away from accepting guilt too for the many indiscretions of societal violence and genocide. Will these too figure in statues like the Salt March of Dandi?
So statues will continue to endure, either by their installation or their decimation or their reinterpretation, simply because people look up to tangible, tactile heroes and feel a transformative moment of rising to their potential, if only briefly. People like to look up to a Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose than the many netajis of contemporary politics who have eroded the allure of leadership. So they make a hue and cry in Kolkata when his bronzed likeness gets crusted with bird droppings. Or feel respectful enough to not even smoke around the statue of Vivekananda in Kanyakumari, his bigness reminding them to elevate themselves momentarily. And nobody may have heeded the angst of Rohith Vermula when he was alive but the Dalit student, who committed suicide driven by casteist moves against him, has managed to galvanise a movement in his university and ensure that human rights are executed, not given out as a dole. Talking in front of his newly-constructed statue, one of the student leaders Sreerag P had said, “Rohith was an imperative force, who through his memories, rekindles the ethos of resistance which are carved into our political psyche.”
Call it retributive, restorative or retrospective justice but till we deal with falsification and denials of history tellers, the politics and debates around building statues will continue to gather steam. And since we are a far cry from developing living icons, except in the spiritual sphere, and humans cannot easily become demi-gods, there will be no easy answers. Had that been the case, we would be celebrating modern shrines like the Jammu & Kashmir Railway, an unimaginable feat and temple of modern India among the shifting Himalayas with the world’s highest arch bridge. But we have not yet learnt to celebrate or acknowledge the efforts of little big men.
(The writer is Associate Editor, The Pioneer)
