The truth behind statues
Santosh Desai
December 18, 2006
The statue is a memory device designed to make us forget. Or to put it more accurately, in today’s context the statue promotes amnesia rather than remembrance. That might seem an odd thing to say given the recent rioting that followed the desecration of Dr Ambedkar’s statue. It would seem to indicate that the statue is a powerful symbol that keeps memory of the great intact and allows their supporters to channelise their feeling towards their heroes. We honour the truly great with statues; we erect larger than life images that seek to inspire us through their magnificence. We dot public spaces with these installations in an effort to keep them immortal.
Statues freeze memory on a grand scale. Homage is paid to the men and women in question by making their bodies monuments of achievement. The corporeal nature of the homage underlines that we are remembering the person more than his ideas. Karl Marx makes for a better statue than a copy of The Communist Manifesto; the person is after all the best way for us to remember his ideas. However, the truth is that statues do not seek to remind us of the reasons for a persons greatness; they celebrate the mere memory of his
existence. Read literally, statues serve to remind future generations that Gandhi wore Lennon glasses and Marx had a big beard.
Statues erase memory by making us remember too little. They allow us to believe that we have not forgotten with putting any pressure on us to remember anything substantial. They mark our desire for memory but do not actually evoke it. And by virtue of being imposed on unwitting public spaces they invite blindness. With time they become pigeon-dropping encrusted landmarks that only those new to the city notice. Unlike idols in a temple which serve a similar purpose but need to be travelled to specifically, the statue by being permanently available becomes permanently invisible. Memory hides in full public view.
Statues end up arousing negative memories rather than positive ones. They invite claimants only when they are defiled. Lenin’s statue was at its most useful when it was toppled after the collapse of the USSR. Ditto for Saddam. Revolutions need statues to topple; stable societies find very little productive about them.
The statue differs from its more contemporary avatar, the cut-out in interesting ways. The cut-out is a twodimensional magnification of transient greatness. It trades size for permanence. It is cinematic rather than operatic. The cut-out is to the statue what celebrity is to the truly great. At one level, the cut-out is more magnificent in its pretence but at another
more realistic about its eventual mortality. It is rooted in the here-andnow, unlike the statue which changes meaning along with time. The statue by virtue of its longevity is consumed differently as contexts change. The Gandhi statue is an inspiration, a site for ritual homage, a
dusty anachronism and a reminder of the latest blockbuster depending on who notices it in which era.( Sadly the Gandhi statues are unable to depict him as he was in Munnabhai Lagey Raho)
The statue is not only way used to preserve memory. The names of roads, parks, public institutions, photographs on walls are all methods to signal our gratitude to the great of earlier times. In most cases, the effect produced is similar; Mahatma Gandhi Road becomes MG Road.
What the statue and other memory marking devices achieve inspite of their apparent distortions is to create an environment dotted with reference points of the past. They help create a sense of continuity by populating our present with the phosphorescent markers of our past. The truth is that while Gandhi’s ideas are more important than the man, they are of little use in keeping a sense of the past alive. Statues have nothing to do with usefulness; they are here so that in this age of the perpetual present created by media, we remain dimly aware that we had a past once.
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