STATUE MANIA

Statues are always in news, whether they are being erected or being pulled down. The most lasting image of the US war in Iraq was the felling of the statues of Saddam Hussain. With the fall of Hitler’s Germany, Nazi monuments throughout the former Reich were hastily pulled down, part of a wider effort to exorcise the spectre of National Socialism. The Bamiyan Buddhas were blasted by the Taliban to register their religious superiority. Charlottesville in America saw deadly protests sometimes back 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.

Statues and memorials embody narratives of the past and symbolize societal values. Be it for religious significance, commemoration of patriots, representation of country, preservation of cultural heritage, famous celebrities and revered leaders; monuments are collective tributes to memorialize unique individuals, events and activities. And, to this end, statues and memorials are having profound impact on societies and their culture.

Nations devote substantial energy and resources to commemorating heroes from the past in monumental form. Helke Rausch’s important work on the political uses of statues in European capitals between 1848 and 1914 shows that major cities received dozens of new monuments: Paris gained 78 new statues, Berlin 59 and London 61. With good reason, historians often characterise the 19th century as an age of ‘statuomania’.

These monuments continue to shape the fabric of European cities. The gilded bronze statue of Joan of Arc installed in Paris’ Place des Pyramides in 1874, for example, remains a familiar sight in the French capital. Every summer, Joan greets the Tour de France as its riders circle the city’s historic heart during the final stage of the race. The statue of Richard I erected outside London’s Palace of Westminster in 1860 still stands proudly outside the home of Parliament.

The Indian Scenario

India is today in the forefront of spending on statues. From the whopping Rs 2,990 crore Sardar Patel statue to the Rs. 2,800 crore Shivaji statue to Mayawati’s elephant statues costing crores of rupees, to a proposed 2,000-acre grand Vishnu temple complex modelling Cambodia’s Angkor Vat temple; are all no less political projects aimed at garnering political dividends. Post independence the Congress party saturated the Indian landscape with statues of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajive Gandhi and almost every city had one or two of them. In fact one had to cross the Bay of Bengal and visit the Cellular Jail in Andaman to realize that there were contribution from other freedom fighters as well in our struggle for independence. The rise of Bahujan Samaj Party introduced us to some Dalit ikons like B.R. Ambedkar, Chatrapati Shahu ji, Udha Devi, Suheldev, Jyotirao Phule and Kanshi Ram. Not stopping there the party supremo Mayawati commissioned and erected her own statues to achieve a cult status! Since 2014 with the change in the government and the demise of Congress the statues on the Indian landscape have started changing. It is now the opportunity for the right wing to showcase their politicians like Shyama Prasad Mukherji, Atal Bihari Vajpai and Deen Dayal Uppadhayya.

Statue of Unity - Sardar Patel

In India people don’t raise objections to statues of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Shaheed Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, APJ Abdul Kalam and J. R. D. Tata and a few others. However, such examples are few and far between. Country’s policymakers have seemingly taken note of Jean Sibelius’s words – “Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honour of a critic.”

Size does matter when it comes to statues. In Nehruvian times , 50ft was considered too tall a luxury for a socialist government to fund. But the logic of the Modi age propels monuments into orbits of machismo meant to dwarf everything else that has come before. Not content with the apotheosis of national icons, the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh has decided to reach for the divine itself. On the banks of the Sarayu river in Ayodhya, a 151m-tall statue of Ram will be built. In Maharashtra, the proposed Ram statue has put pressure on the state government to see if the Shivaji Memorial can go even higher. But what does a tax-payer do? It is almost a sin to ask why government exchequer should suffer as policymakers splurge on political projects. Also, why should there be prioritization of monument-funding over societal development when our budget on health and education is so abysmally insufficient.

Statues are not immortal

Lenin's statue toppled in Tripura

The building and destruction of statues has become a proxy for political battles over ideology, identity and memory. An election victory in a democracy which topples a government and chooses an alternative one also comes with a change of the grand narrative, an ideological and political construct to obliterate an earlier one. Consequently it results in the birth of new statues and, at times, even the destruction of old ones. Lenin’s statues were pulled down in Kerala after the democratic demise of the communist rule. Perriar’s and Ambedkar’s statues have been desecrated more than once by anti-reservationists. Few people outside Tripura knew that the state had a couple of Vladimir Lenin statues. Mobs of vandals, allegedly from the BJP, toppled the Russian revolutionary from the two pedestals he stood on after the 25-year-old Communist Party of India (Marxist) rule in Tripura fell to the BJP. When you build a statue, you resurrect an era. When you destroy one, you end an era!

Unceremonious send off to Edward Colston in Bristol

Statues have mixed fortunes. One day they can be the showpiece of the city square but the very next day they can be lying in the backroom of a museum, or worse still, in the floor of an ocean. From US to UK and Belgium the monuments and statues of contentious historical figures are being brought down by anti racism protesters. A wave of anti-racism protests sweeping across the United States and Europe has reignited a debate about monuments glorifying Britain's imperialist past, which many people see as offensive in today's multi-ethnic society. Statues are at the forefront of this rage and anger. Protesters in the port city of Bristol tore down a statue of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston and threw it into the harbor. After Edward Colston's statue the demand is for removal of statues of Robert Clive and Cecil Rhodes have started gaining momentum. But by removing these symbols of slavery and oppression will we be able to forget about British imperialism. Has toppling of Colston's statue erased his legacy? Or is there something more to it. Had it started assuming a new and more relevant significance, more in tune with today’s problem of racial discrimination?

Rhodes overlooking Oxford High Street

The Rhodes Scholarship has been a source of funding and prestige for generations of international students. 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 the demonstrators said the statue of Rhodes should no longer have pride of place on the facade of Oriel College, which overlooks Oxford's High Street. There are larger ambitions of this movement – that is, to bring out into the open institutional racism in university life in South Africa and Britain, and to decolonize education – speak to concerns that many have had for a while. These concerns, by now, have a long itinerary, but they have been awaiting a forum for articulation.

So why is a philanthropist of Cecel Rhodes’s stature being defamed so many years after his death? The problem lies in his will. The vision embodied in his will is very disturbing, to say the least. It called for:

“the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan …”

But if you replace the word “British” with “western” and “United Kingdom” with “the west”, you find this statement in his will encapsulates not only Rhodes’s vision but a vision of the world today, one that has had a fresh lease on life in the last two decades – in which unequal access to opportunity and mobility is structurally embedded as the norm; in which the west should still have free passage to, and control of, the rest of the world, whether via business, expatriation, or military intervention – while those travelling to the west must be viewed as potential refugees or people posing as asylum seekers.

The past few years have seen ongoing campaigns in the US to have Civil War statues commemorating Confederate figures removed from public spaces. Counter-campaigners have sought to maintain those statues as they are. What these episodes all have in common is that, within each, monuments have become lightning rods for wider conflicts between competing visions of history.

Is there an alternative?

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.”

Proponents of retaining controversial monuments have suggested that to remove them would be to efface a part of history. They argue that statues should be preserved because they teach people about the past. But is viewing a statue actually an effective way of learning about history? There is however an alternate point of view as well. Some who oppose particular monuments do not wish to take them down entirely, however, asserting that simply removing a statue is tantamount to pretending a traumatic event in the past never happened. Rather, they advocate removing controversial statues while retaining their pedestals as a reminder of the events that they invoke. Accordingly, empty plinths throughout the US show that some communities have confronted their difficult pasts in this way.

Another option is preservation. The fate of the grand statue of Frederick the Great erected on Berlin’s Unter den Linden in 1839 has been intertwined with the history of the city. During the Second World War, the monument was encased in protective cement. Beginning in 1950, the DDR authorities relocated it several times. It was only after the reunification of Germany in 1990 that Frederick was returned to his original 1839 location.

Different sensitivities and sensibilities

Taking down statues cannot atone the wrongdoings but are merely a symbolic way of confronting the past. Historic evil, systemic injustice, socioeconomic discrepancy and racial oppression all find reflection in these statues and so even after centuries they continue to offend sensibilities. But then whose sensitivity and sensibility are we talking about. When the British cheer the defacement of Karl Marx's epitaph and seethe in anger when Winston Churchill's statue, is vandalized there is a problem. We Indians loathe Churchill because he was the cause of more than a million deaths in Bengal famine, but the British consider him a war hero against the forces of fascism.

So history has judged people differently at different times. Columbus discovered America but also the slave trade and was vilified long before the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Robert Clive died as the most hated man in England. In Washington DC they are angry with Mahatma Gandhi because he restricted his anti-imperialism movement only to India, conveniently forgetting that both Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King jr. were inspired by him. 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.