As tools of political expression and remembrance go, the ‘Statue of Unity’ project dreamt up by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in a league of its own.

Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the first home minister of free India, is the ‘Iron man’ credited with bringing together 565 disparate princely states into one nation-state. Alive to the enormous political gains in appropriating his legacy, Modi, as the then chief minister of Gujarat, forcefully underscored the ‘need’ for the statue during election rallies. However, a drive to collect iron from across the country for the memorial has largely backfired as nearly 16 States are yet to respond.

After his elevation as prime minister, Modi renewed his interest in the project by allocating it ₹200 crore from the Union Budget. ‘The Statue of Unity’ site states: “India cannot afford to bury the life of a man as great as Sardar Patel... it is to make Sardar Patel a source of inspiration for every generation that such a massive and divine statue is being built.”

While the Patel statue is the tallest planned so far, it is by no means the first along these lines. Across the country are several longstanding projects to erect statues for personalities ranging from the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji and architect of the Indian Constitution BR Ambedkar in Mumbai to the 133-feet statue of the Tamil poet and philosopher Thiruvalluvar in Kanyakumari.

“The fact is that statues have been prominent tools of political expression from antiquity,” says AG Krishna Menon, convenor, Intach Delhi. “In India, you can find images of patrons sculpted on temple walls; and from colonial times, the European model of placing statues of kings. And more recently, cultural figures became the established norm. This model is rooted in the Greek and Roman antiquity of Europe.”

Those that went before

Potti Sreeramulu, the man whose fast and subsequent death led to the creation of Andhra Pradesh in 1953, for instance, became revered as Amarajeevi (immortal being) and his statues appeared in every major urban centre in the newly carved-out State. And in a strange and telling turn of events, later, as the movement for a breakaway Telangana heated up, many of Sreeramulu’s statues in those parts were desecrated.

In Tamil Nadu, a State which routinely elects its political leaders from the world of cinema, idolatry and statues are integral to any narrative of power.

On a December morning in 2002, the statue of Kannagi, “the one who burnt the Pandyan capital of Madurai to ashes” in the Tamil epic Cillappatikaram , went missing from its pedestal on the city’s Marina promenade. While the official communication given out was that a truck had rammed into the statue and it had been moved for repairs, rumours swirled that political powers were behind the shift, as astrologers had warned that the statue would bring bad luck to the rulers of the State.

The statue’s translocation to the Government Museum created a predictable uproar, which many believe led to the ruling party’s defeat in the following Assembly elections. The incoming chief minister and DMK stalwart M Karunanidhi promptly reinstalled the statue at the Marina. Interestingly, it was Karunanidhi who commissioned the statue in 1968, when he was the public works minister, and his party counts among its chief achievements, the many statues it installed on the Marina of figures from Tamil literature.

An easy target

In his essay about statues in Trivandrum, historian Robin Jeffrey writes: “The statue unveiled on May 30, 1893… was a way of saying to British rulers: ‘We too have statesmen. Anything you can do, we also can do.’ It was as much a symbol of achievement as the Secretariat across the road.” He was referring to the statue of Dewan Sir T Madhav Rao.

Equally as statues are used to prop up a cause or personality, they are the first to be attacked by those on the opposing side.

During the height of the Naxalbari movement in the late ’60s, the statues that were seen as representative of the Bengal State machinery were repeatedly vandalised. “They considered statues of leaders like Ram Mohan Roy, the philosopher Ishwar Chandra Vidya Sagar, and of those belonging to the Bengali renaissance as symbols of the bourgeoisie,” says Shantanu Sengupta, a scholar at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. “These statues were regularly found decapitated or brought crashing to the ground all through that period.”

‘Chappal garlands’ and other means of desecrating Ambedkar statues are usually how the first blood is drawn in any attacks against the Dalit community. The episodes lead to all-out clashes between communities. In the lead-up to the Andhra Pradesh Assembly by-elections in 2012, for example, within a week at least six Ambedkar statues were attacked across the State.

And while the debate rages over whether it is justified to build a statue costing four times the money needed for a Mars mission, Ram Sutar, the 90-year-old sculptor famous for constructing many of the Mayawati statues commissioned by a former Uttar Pradesh chief minister, offers some sobering perspective. “A statue’s life is longer than a person’s. So once constructed, it can take on any number of meanings as is convenient for that time in history.” Sutar should know. He’s been building statues for 67 years.

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