Let sleeping statues stand, why lose sleep over them

In Shimla’s Christ Church, there is an impressive plaque dedicated to General Sir Gerald de Courcy Morton, once Adjutant-General of the Indian Army. The last two lines describe him as: “Of a noble character and a simple gentleman.” He may have been that to his family and to a circle of comrades; in reality, he was anything but. This was the man behind the development of the dumdum bullet for warfare. The notoriety of this bullet lay in the fact that it was used for big-game hunting and expanded on impact, causing maximum injury. The Hague Convention of 1899 banned its use but not before its defenders proclaimed: ‘The savage, like the tiger, needed to be stopped in its tracks.’ This memorial is an extraordinary piece of ‘lesser-known’ history. In its silence, this stands testimony to a period that if not analysed and treated with maturity and understood for its nuances, opens doors to destructive forces.

Far away from Shimla, in the thriving port town of Bristol located in the southwest of England, during the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, the statue of the wealthy merchant and slave-trader, Edward Colston, was pulled down and thrown into the harbour. It was subsequently retrieved and placed in a museum. Before it was removed, repeated texts went back and forth for a plaque that would explain Colston’s role both as a philanthropist and as a slaver. That plaque never came about. While this is for another country and another culture to decide, had that text been placed, the statue could have escaped a dunking and Colston’s disposition would have been explained. Even after it has been brushed under the carpet, history, no matter where, has a strange way of worming a way out.

A year or so back, one visited Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi and noticed that the bust of Edwin Lutyens, the architect of this magnificent building, which was placed at the head of an impressive staircase, was missing. “It has been sent for restoration,” I was told. “Ah well, another bust bites the dust” was what one instinctively thought. I was there a few weeks back and was pleasantly surprised to find it back in the place where it had been for decades. Some conversations later, one came to learn that it was on its way out and would shortly be replaced by a statue of C Rajagopalachari, the first Indian Governor-General who took office in 1948 after Lord Mountbatten demitted it. Placing a statue of Rajaji, as he was fondly called, seems logical, the removal of Lutyens’ does not.

In another part of Delhi lies Coronation Park — a place that I’d call a ‘Graveyard of Empire’. A half-hearted creation with half-hearted maintenance, the area of the park covers a substantial 53 acres. The only time the place seems to come alive is around lunch time, when people gather and eat in the shade of trees, and in the evenings, when children use the small playground. Rare groups of tourists occasionally come by.

In various phases of wither, here rest some of the statues that have been removed from other parts of the city and placed here. ‘Coronation Park’ was the site of the three great durbars of 1877, 1903 and 1911. The third, in 1911, announced the shift of the capital from Kolkata to New Delhi. An obelisk marks the place where King George and Queen Mary received homage from the Indian princes and others. Today, just across from that strategically placed obelisk, is the forlorn statue of the one-time King Emperor of India. This was what stood in the canopy near India Gate, which now holds the statue of Subhas Chandra Bose. The king’s 70-foot-high statue was an exemplary piece of sculpture that had been executed by Charles Sargeant Jagger. At a time when one in four persons on our planet lived under the shadow of the British flag, this may have been an exceptional piece of art, but perhaps, more importantly, was a powerful political statement.

It continued to remain in its place by India Gate for several years after Independence. When American President Dwight Eisenhower visited India in 1959, he is believed to have remarked something to the effect that “America had got rid of its King George and what was India still doing with theirs?” After the statue was vandalised in 1966, it was removed and subsequently placed where it now stands.

The colonisation of history along with the colonisation of the country was a fairly simple process. Everything that was pre-colonial was dismissed. The colonial power portrayed itself as the lord and saviour of India, Africa, and the Caribbean — or of any other handy part of the world. De-colonising is trickier. The slope is slippery and one cannot be as sweepingly dismissive. With his consistent perspicacity, Mark Twain noted: “Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains.” Every once in a while, a moment comes when an individual or nation stands at the cusp of greatness or failure. We stand at that moment.

There is more to our nation’s destiny than the removal of statues and the renaming of towns. There is a thin fine line that statues may also walk. That having been said, there is only national maturity and confidence to display by allowing certain sleeping statues to stand.

— The writer is an author based in Shimla