The Phantom Lady
Strikes Again
The air is thick with
identity controversies which seem to manifest themselves over statues and
monuments. The Phantom Lady ponders.
HEROES
If you wander about the city of Bangalore, you will be
surprised to find many of its public statues wrapped with cloth as if a local
Christo had been hard at work. One of these was the statue of the Tamil saint
poet Thiruvalluvar near the Ulsoor Lake erected by the Tamil Sangham. Ulsoor is a Tamil area, and hostilities
have existed ever since the British, after the defeat of Tipu, created the
largest cantonment in India in Bangalore and populated it with Tamils to
counter the Kannada speaking City area under the Maharaja of Mysore. These
hostilities have worsened lately with Kaveri water disputes. Kannada
nationalists would not allow the statue to be unveiled, and Thiruvalluvar has
remained a ‘conceptual’ work for eighteen years till a statue of the Kannada
saint poet Sarvagna was put up in
Chennai. Both were inaugurated in close sequence recently in a great
demonstration of what was called ‘statue diplomacy’, and considered a momentous
step in the strained inter- state politics by all.
The Tamils are great forerunners in many matters cultural,
and the Dravidian and pure Tamil movements created a strong self-identity.
Chennai itself is a city mapped by its statues of Tamil heroes. They say if you
asked someone for directions there he would say - go past the Anna statue and
turn left at the Kamaraj Statue - and
so on. The Marina beach has large memorials on its sands dedicated to
Annadurai, MGR etc. (On the pavement of the beach is also one of the most
famous works of modern art in the city, Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury’s bronze
sculpture, Triumph of Labour). NTR as
chief minister of Andhra installed a row of bronze statues of Telugu heroes on
the Tank Bund Road in Hyderabad, and the joke goes that they all look like him
in various roles as a film actor, including the woman poet. The twenty- two
metre great granite Buddha which sank once, but has been safely installed now
in the centre of the Husain Sagar Lake, is also said to bear a close
resemblance to him.
Mumbai, being larger and richer than any of these cities,
has planned to build a 350 crore Shivaji monument outdoing the Statue of
Liberty, standing on its own island in the sea. The irony, as Girish Shahane
writes, is that while Liberty is a universal symbol of freedom and democracy,
Shivaji has been co-opted as a mascot for Hindu/ Marathi identity politics and
has become a symbol of divisiveness. Mayavati’s agenda is more ambitious: she
is erecting statues of herself and Dalit icons on twenty four memorial sites in
the state of Uttar Pradesh. A front-page case has been going on in the Supreme
Court to stop the construction work on public money. So what is the real
opposition to Mayavati’s memorial building – its lavish use of government
money, that she is a ‘heroine’ and not a ‘hero’, its Vanitas ; or the fact that
it is going to be a place of Dalit identity, where there is none other? Or are these
purposes so inextricably mixed like good and evil in our complicated times,
that we cannot separate them?
After the first heady idealistic days of early independence,
making political statues has become embarrassing for contemporary artists. The
language of contemporary art is anti-establishment, while the public demand is
for idealized neo-classical representations. Then who makes these statues? The
good sculptors are usually trained in the big art schools and specialize in making
political portraits, or are from traditional families of sculptors. Some time
ago I visited a factory near Gwalior which takes orders to make political
statues from most of North India. As a busload of us approached, we saw acres
and acres of spectacular rolling hillocks, set with dramatic groups of figures
of political leaders all gesturing into the air in their characteristic poses: Netaji
Bose, Rajiv Gandhi, Indira, Nehru, Dr. Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh, Jhansi ki Rani,
Mahatma Gandhi. It was an amazing sight: the heroes, the vast sky, the bare
landscape, and the larger than life tableaux in various perspectives in the clear
light of the panoramic view. The factory makes fibre-glass casts first from the
clay models, then takes moulds from them and casts them in bronze. The waste
fibre-glass models are then placed on the site, making a kind of unmeant
installation of dark post-modernist satire.
Who then can be the heroes of our times, and how can we
celebrate their lives?
I recently saw The
Advocate, a film made by Deepa Dhanraj on the Hyderabad lawyer KG
Kannabiran, one of the founders of the human rights and civil liberties
movements in India, a man who has spent a lifetime challenging the Indian State
to uphold justice. While the first part of the film is a biography and history
dominated by his charismatic presence, the second half, with interviews with
his wife and colleagues, contains a critique. He is never shown larger than
life, but as passionate, hardworking, brilliantly analytical, firm in his
beliefs and relentlessly persistent. His wife, prominent in the women’s
movement herself, critiques him for his lack of interest in women’s issues as
being central to human rights; his colleagues, for other weaknesses in his
thinking and practice. But finally, the film in both its parts makes a
monumental plea for a way of life that is serious minded and committed to
social justice, lit up with an intense life-energy. At a time of extreme
hysteria over icons and symbols, the biography shows that a reasoned analysis
and historical sense need not belittle, nor aggrandize, an exemplary life.
The Phantom Lady
1 March 2010
