Ram Sutar @100

The Noida home of Ram Vanaji Sutar is hard to miss. Marble and bronze statues of Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and Indira Gandhi fill its balconies. Inside, a gallery of giants greets you — Mahatma Gandhi bending down to pick a handful of salt at Dandi, and more of Nehru, Patel and Indira. Statues of gods, goddesses, sages, legendary warriors, and politicians stare with steely eyes at or beyond you. In the huge workshop inside, a young sculptor wearing headphones is carving the paws of a 7-foot-high squirrel out of a white thermocol kind of material. It’s meant for a temple in Ayodhya. The rest of the room is filled with awards and pieces of sculptures — a head here, a hand there, some of them gargantuan, while others are scaled models. Ram Sutar, termed by many, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as one of India’s greatest living sculptors, is waiting in a room just beyond.

Sutar, who turned 100 in February, wears hearing aids in both ears but is otherwise in good health. He has stopped sculpting because the clay hurts his fingers, but comes to ‘office’ daily and gives suggestions and advice to the team. Anil Sutar, his sculptor-architect son, says his father is regular with his yoga sessions of an hour or so before dinner. Between them, they run one of India’s biggest firms that specialises in monumental sculptures.

The clay modelling studio I am in is just one location. There are two foundries, one of which has the capacity to do 10,000-kg castings per day. Small wonder then that Sutar sculpted the iconic ‘Statue of Unity’, a homage to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s first Home Minister, installed at Sardar Sarovar Dam, Sadhu Bet, Gujarat. It is the world’s tallest statue at a towering 597 feet (182 metres). If that isn’t impressive enough, Ram Sutar sculpted it when he was in his nineties. The Gujarat government had initially hired a US-based project consultant, who assigned sculptor Joseph Menna to come up with the statue’s first digital proof-of-the-concept model. However, they realised that Menna’s digital proof was an adaptation of Sutar’s statue of Sardar Patel at the Ahmedabad airport. Hence, L&T, the company designing and constructing the project, was asked to offer it to Sutar instead. “We didn’t have the space for cutting such a large size. So, we sent the design to China. The foundry there enlarged each segment and made the pieces, and then it was put together on the spot,” Sutar explains.

The centenarian says he has created more than 8,000 statues, around 450 of Gandhi alone, which have been installed all over the world, including in France, USA, Italy, Argentina, Barbados, Russia, UK, Malaysia, Germany, Australia, China, Egypt, Poland and South Africa. The one he remembers the most is a bust of Mahatma Gandhi that he made from cement in 1948, installed in the school in which Sutar studied.

“Gandhi taught my generation about cleanliness and service, especially to our teachers,” he states. He also remembers participating in the Lezim dance while in school in Gondur, Maharashtra.

Sutar credits the statues at Elephanta Caves — especially the Trimurti — for shaping his artistic eye. When he went to work with the Archaeology Department in Aurangabad between 1954 and 1958, after studying at the Sir JJ School of Art in Bombay, he caught the eye of art critic Charles Fabri, who tasked him with repairing some broken statues in Ellora Caves.

He came down to Delhi to work with the government. There was an agriculture fair for which he made statues of a couple and an individual. The department objected to his working outside the organisation as a government servant, so he resigned.

SK Joglekar, Chief Architect, CPWD, asked him to make the Ashoka Stambh for Parliament House. The payment was Rs 3,000, and Jawaharlal Nehru attended the inauguration.

Joglekar introduced him to a Bhopal architect who was working on the Gandhisagar Dam. At the time, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh were feuding over the distribution of Chambal river waters from this dam. Sutar created a statue he’s clearly proud of — a 45-foot-tall sculpture of River Mother sharing water with her two children, symbolising the two states. “There was no budget,” he laughs. “I asked for Rs 10,000 for labour. I took a sheet, poured concrete on it to make a mountain, and sculpted the rest.” Nehru inaugurated the statue in 1961.

Impressed, Nehru later commissioned Sutar to design a 50-foot-tall bronze monument titled ‘Triumph of Labour’ to honour workers who died building the Bhakra-Nangal Dam. Though it was eventually shelved due to budget issues, other assignments followed. One was a 9-foot-tall statue of freedom fighter Govind Ballabh Pant. Originally installed near the Raisina Road circle outside Parliament in 1966, it was moved in 2021 to Pandit Pant Marg in front of Gurdwara Rakab Ganj to make way for the new Parliament building. Replicas now stand in Ranikhet, Almora, Ludhiana and Lucknow. He also created a statue of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, the former Minister of Agriculture, for Krishi Bhawan.

Then came a landmark moment: Sutar was asked to sculpt a statue of Mahatma Gandhi for the 53.25 feet (16.23m) tall red stone canopy at India Gate, which once held a statue of King George V.

He designed a statue of the Mahatma standing with two children, representing the poor of the world that the Mahatma had taken under his wings. “I used my son as the model,” he says with glee, as he shows around the room where the scaled models of some of his major works are kept. He was also asked to make a seated contemplative model. It didn’t fit under the canopy and was placed in the Parliament complex instead. This statue of a seated, serene Gandhi in flowing robes became one of Sutar’s most iconic works. It represented Gandhi’s peaceful resistance and proximity to the people. It was a shift in national iconography — from colonial rulers to champions of peace and democracy.

A 27-foot-tall (8.2m) replica was inaugurated in 2014 at the Vidhana Soudha, Bengaluru. It is said to be the world’s tallest statue of Gandhi in a seated position.

But Sutar felt the need to touch the skies. In 2022, his ‘Statue of Prosperity’, a statue of Kempe Gowda, the founder and architect of the city of Bangalore, was installed at the Kempe Gowda International Airport, Devanahalli, Bengaluru. The record breaking 108-foot-tall statue with a sword that weighs 4 tonnes is the tallest bronze statue of a founder of a city. In 2023, his 175-foot-tall statue of BR Ambedkar was installed next to the Dr BR Ambedkar Telangana State Secretariat in Hussain Nagar, Hyderabad.

The statue, which is 125 feet tall and stands on a 50 feet high plinth, is the tallest statue of Ambedkar in the world. But Sutar is designing a 175-foot Ambedkar statue at the Indu mill memorial project in Mumbai. I ask him what his favourite subject is, and he says: “Ambedkar. He taught people how to get work. Big statues help in creating work.”

Some of the big statues he is currently working on include a 100-foot-tall bronze statue of Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj in Pune, a 400-foot-tall statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji to be installed in Mumbai, and a 600-foot-tall statue of Lord Ram that is to be installed in Ayodhya. Each of these statues has an entire ecosystem near it. The statue of Lord Ram, for instance, will be installed in 61 hectares of land in Mirpur, Ayodhya, and there will be a museum, library, food court and other tourist amenities. A budget of Rs 447 crore was allocated for the project in November 2019. Besides a 151-metre-tall statue, there would be a 20-metre umbrella overhead, and a 50-metre pedestal. Just recently, a 91-foot-tall statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji, including a 10-foot-high pedestal and a sword, was inaugurated at the Rajkot fort in Sindhudurg district in Maharashtra.

With the assistance of engineers from IIT-Bombay and head of the JJ School of Arts, Sutar designed and executed the work in less than five months. The statue, which replaces the 35-foot-tall structure that collapsed in August 2024, cost over Rs 20 crore and is designed to withstand extreme winds, including cyclones. As per Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who inaugurated the statue, Ram Sutar Art Creations will maintain the statue for 10 years.

Neither Sutar nor Anil, his son, mention this feat, apart from a small aside about Anil needing to travel to Maharashtra.

Government after government has recognised Sutar. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2016. In October 2018, he received the Tagore Award for cultural harmony. He was recently awarded the Maharashtra Bhushan, the state’s highest civilian award.

As I take in all the awards, casts and photos, Sutar urges me to look at a photo from Gandhisagar Dam. It shows a small figure, alone, sculpting the hair of a 45-foot-tall goddess. The image calls to mind King Bhagirath’s penance to bring the Ganga river down to earth — a mythological resonance in tune with the many figures watching silently from every corner of his home. It also made me think about longevity — of the man, his work, and his models, whom we’ve known through the lens of Ram Sutar’s eyes for so long, without realising it. And in that moment, I’m struck by something simple and profound. We are surrounded by heroes who shape the world, quietly, one stone at a time.

— The writer is a Delhi-based art critic