Statues, Decolonisation, and Memory | SLR Interviews Dr Rahul Rao - Part I

SLR recently interviewed Dr. Rahul Rao, a prominent scholar whose work sits at the critical intersections of international relations, postcolonial and queer theory, and comparative political thought. He is currently a Reader in International Political Thought at the University of St Andrews, having previously taught at SOAS University of London and held a fellowship at University College, Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, Dr. Rao earned his DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford and holds a BA, LLB (Hons.) from the National Law School of India University. His published books include Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020) and Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (2010). 

Our editors, Jyotika Tomar and Lipi Agarwal, interviewed him to discuss his latest book, The Psychic Lives of Statues (Pluto Press, 2025). It explores the politics of statues, an inquiry that resonates powerfully with global debates on memory, identity, and decolonisation.

In the first part of our conversation with Dr Rahul Rao, we discuss the global politics of iconography and memory and the intervention of law in the movement. Dr Rao discusses in particular, the role of the community of Rhodes scholars. The full interview can be watched on YouTube.

To begin with, could you tell us a bit about the book and what drew you to write it?

Thank you so much for this opportunity to talk about the book and for your engagement with it. 

I suppose many people who have not been thinking about statues at all would have noticed that they had suddenly become, or appeared to suddenly become, sites of contention in 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests that began in the US and then spread to many parts of the world, when statues seemed to become a ground or a terrain for the expression or the contestation of racial and caste supremacy. 

Of course for us in India, statues have been sites of political competition and antagonism for very much longer. I started paying attention to statue protests in 2015, when a movement called Rhodes Must Fall erupted in Cape Town in South Africa.  ​​This was a protest against the continuing legacies of apartheid in South Africa, more than two decades after the formal end of apartheid. The protesters took the statue of Cecil Rhodes, the Victorian settler colonist, which still sat on their campus as a metaphor for the endurance of those legacies of apartheid and what they were really protesting against was the whiteness of the curriculum, of the student and staff body, of the iconography and the built environment that they were surrounded by.

The reason I took notice of Rhodes Must Fall is because I had come to Oxford as a graduate student on a Rhodes Scholarship in 2001. Of course, anyone who applies for the scholarship knows that it is a bequest that Rhodes makes in his will. But the money for the scholarship is drawn from his extractive racial capitalist endeavours in South Africa, or in simple language, his plunder of the resources of southern Africa. So when you apply for a scholarship like that, I imagine everyone asks themselves the question of whether it is legitimate to benefit from the use of colonial plunder. And of course, we  tell ourselves a series of stories about why it might be okay to do that. Those of us who eventually take that money, tell ourselves that we are going to do good things with it, we are going to defy the wishes of the founder, and so on.

When Rhodes Must Fall erupted in 2015, it struck me as a much more militant movement that was not resorting to those kinds of liberal and delusional stories about how ‘bad money could be made good.’ It evoked in me a kind of shame and embarrassment and also excitement that suddenly there was a critical mass of people who were saying things in the public sphere that had sort of rumbled along under the radar amongst the liberal sections of the Rhodes constituency for a long time.So that was the provocation for me to pay attention to these statue controversies. I wrote a blog about this on the Disorder of Things. I was trying to think through all these issues and I left it at that.

In 2017, there was another spike of interest in statues around Confederate statues in the US, which have been long running sites of contention because these are statues that glorify white supremacist figures in US history and have done so for over a century. This confrontation became quite a flashpoint because it occurred during the first Donald Trump administration. One of the statues slated for removal, a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, became the site for a white supremacist “Unite the Right” ally and for anti-racist mobilisations against that, and these became violent. One of the white supremacists drove a car into the anti-racist protesters and killed a protester, and Trump infamously weighed in by saying, “There are very fine people on both sides.” So once again, statues became the ground on which some of the fault lines of the culture wars were being drawn.

Then of course, the big 2020 moment after the murder of George Floyd. So it felt to me like statues were playing a role in contemporary public life, which perhaps they had played for a long time. But I suppose in my lifetime as a writer and a thinker, it felt like a phenomenon and a moment that needed to be understood and thought through. That's why I ended up writing this book. That's broadly the period that I am also interested in, the last 10 years. Although there are various moments in the book when, of course, one has to historicise all of these developments and think through their logics in a longer time horizon.

In a much longer historical perspective, you might say the book is a history of the present. It has a kind of long durée imagination, but it is also concerned with the contemporary stakes of these questions.

Your primary training was in the law, and since we are based out of a law school, we are interested in whether that in any way shaped your approach towards thinking about these questions and if you have noted legal responses to the controversies around statues in recent times. Has the law, either in its action or in its absence, also accounted for shifting perceptions around these statues culturally and politically?

Certainly. My initial training was in law, but it now feels like quite a long time ago and I never practiced as a lawyer. I would say that I have always been interested in norms. Law is a kind of norm, but it is obviously not the only kind of norm. It is an institutionalised norm. I have been interested in norms in the wider sense, social practices that sediment into ways of doing things that crystallise into moral oughts. So yes, I have been interested in the law and norms. There isn’t a great deal of attention to law in the book, although your question does make me think or reminds me that there is actually a very considerable legal apparatus that surrounds statues and monuments and memorials.

Some of this is about preservation and protection. In the midst of these culture wars, the law was certainly deployed in a very forceful way. For example, in many southern states in the United States, there are preservation laws passed by predominantly Republican state governments that protect Confederate monuments and memorials and insulate them from any kind of challenge or recontextualisation. At the height of the COVID pandemic in 2021, the UK Government also passed a similar law to protect statues and monuments and memorials from any kind of challenge. The policy was called ‘Retain and Explain,’ and as that term suggests, the emphasis was on keeping things intact and perhaps, if there was political will, offering some kind of recontextualisation of the history of whatever was being memorialised.

That is one way in which the law was invoked and deployed. It was also deployed to punish people and this was also a period in which penalties for any kind of statue desecration or defacement were ramped up in the UK, in Australia and elsewhere. The law was deployed primarily to protect statues and punish iconoclasts. And perhaps that is what the law does in a lot of protest situations – protect not the human rights of everybody to speech or expression, but protect symbols of power from any kind of challenge. The law was very much deployed as an ideological instrument to keep power intact, to retain its unequal distribution, to keep the status quo going.

You mentioned that you were a Rhodes Scholar and that experience was a significant reason you were interested in the Rhodes Must Fall movement. How do you think the Rhodes community has responded to contemporary political movements like Rhodes Must Fall? In your public commentary on the community and the movement, you have noted the need for careful analysis of the composition of the community itself, such as a caste-class survey of Indian Rhodes Scholars. Why do you think there has not been reckoned with so far?

On the broader question of the Rhodes community, I think it is a very diverse and divided community and probably always has been on all the big moral and political questions that have confronted it. Certainly, many Rhodes scholars were involved in these mobilisations, both those with connections to southern Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe) and those from other constituencies elsewhere.

I think there are many Rhodes scholars who were very much part of Rhodes Must Fall and were supportive of its ambitions and equally there were others who saw this as an unwarranted challenge to the founder, perhaps even as a form of hypocrisy, in the sense that here were people like me who were benefiting from the scholarship but also criticising the hand that fed us, so to speak. So I would say the Rhodes community was quite divided.

One thing I would say is that my book is essentially, in so far as it talks about the Rhodes scholarship and the community, it is talking about a state of affairs about twenty years ago when I was a Rhodes scholar. In that sense, it is a memoir rather than a contemporary analysis of how that community has shifted. A lot has happened in the time since then, not least because of the efforts of Rhodes Must Fall.

The Rhodes Trust has felt compelled to respond to this challenge, as have many institutions both in the UK and in South Africa particularly. You might say that those gestures have not gone far enough, but there is an ongoing conversation about the legacy of Rhodes, which is today, I think, talked about much more critically than it was when I was a Rhodes Scholar in residence at Oxford. You can see that in different ways – in the way that the built environment of Rhodes House and Oxford has changed somewhat, in the kinds of events that it hosts, in the increasing diversity of the pool of scholars.

This brings us to your second question about the caste and class composition of the Indian Rhodes community. I would say this is an issue not just relevant to the Rhodes scholarship, but to all scholarships, and one might say to all opportunities for graduate education in India.

In the book I make quite a blunt statement about the composition of the Rhodes constituency and it is based on a news report rather than a formal study which, to the best of my knowledge, does not really exist. We do not really have a very good sense of the caste and class composition of Indian students who go abroad. I am sure this work is being done, but it has not, to my mind, received the kind of attention and publicity that it should have. It is of course related to the broader questions about the caste census, which as you know has been opposed by many dominant caste groups and voices.

But yes, I think we do need some kind of reckoning with how these opportunities are distributed. And to your question about why it has not happened yet, I think it is because we have tended to be satisfied (and by we, I mean, including progressives) with the question of entry into institutions via reservation, but not so much with the issue of what happens once students come into the institution and graduate from it. What kinds of career opportunities do they go on to? Have we really measured how much of a boost students from different socio-economic backgrounds get as a result of this educational experience?

This work has been done in small scale ways, in pilot ways in various places, but I don't think we have a big picture account of whether and how graduate education shifts class and caste privileges.

India has not had an equivalent of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, demanding removal against colonial-era statues. Yet, since at least 2014, we see a surge in activities such as renaming roads and cities and removal of statues of Muslim rulers. This is often justified using the rhetoric of decolonisation. How do you respond to this apparent paradox: a seeming indifference to colonial relics of the Raj while symbols of Muslim ‘invaders’ are erased by both the State and those outside it? What does this tell us about decolonial imagination in contemporary India?

You are right that there has never been a large scale movement demanding the toppling of colonial statues. There were demands of this kind in the first decade of the Indian republic around the tenth anniversary of Independence, which was also the hundredth anniversary of the revolt of 1857. There were demands in different states for removal of colonial statues. Nehru was somewhat ambivalent and nuanced about this question. He said well yes, we can remove offensive statues, we can preserve those of historical importance and those that don't matter can be taken by whoever wants them. He made a statement in the Lok Sabha to this effect. After he died in 1964, the removal of colonial statues proceeded in a small wave, and interestingly, they tended to be dumped in places like Coronation Park in Delhi and Barrackpore near Kolkata. We got these ‘statue graveyards’ many decades before this became a thing in Eastern Europe with former communist statues. But you are right, by and large, the attitude is one of benign neglect rather than commemoration or destruction or adoration.

Why is that the case? My hunch is that quite early in the 20th century, decades before independence happened, the fault lines in Indian politics shifted from British versus Indian nationalist to fault lines that are internal to the body politic on the basis of caste and religion. Of course, one of the culminations of that was Partition, but the other consequence and legacy of that is the inter-caste conflict that we continue to witness to this day.

That might be the major reason why colonial statues are not flashpoints in the way that they have been in, say, settler colonies like South Africa or the United States, where the antagonism between settlers and natives and descendants of enslaved people is still very fresh, because the legacies of those processes have continued to be felt in a very palpable way.

You are right also that in recent years, particularly under the Modi regime, we are seeing the deployment of this term ‘decolonisation’ in quite spectacular ways to justify all kinds of things, whether its large scale architectural visions like the Central Vista project and the so-called decolonisation of Delhi. I have read articles that describe the project in those terms. Or, of course the revamping of Indian criminal laws, which you will be much more familiar with than I am, which was again justified in the name of decolonisation. Or, the kind of Vedic age glorification as expressed through reference to ancient medicine, science, the ways in which the university curriculum is being Hinduised and how all of this is being hailed as a kind of decolonisation of the Indian mind.

It intrigues me that the stalwarts of the anti-colonial and postcolonial canon, Chinua Achebe, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o are being hailed by ideologues of the Hindu right in this project of decolonising.

What tends to happen in the Indian context, as you've pointed out, is not the removal of colonial British symbols, but Muslim ones. So for example, renaming Allahabad or the Mughal Gardens, there are so many examples and they keep cropping up everyday. The real audience for these gestures is Indian Muslims and minorities and oppressed caste groups. These are ways of signalling to those audiences about who's in charge, who owns the land, who is dominant.

These are ways of ratifying that dominance, which is all too clear in practical and material terms, so it is a case I would say of recolonisation masquerading as decolonisation. The decolonial rhetoric provides a kind of legitimation. The Right in many parts of the world is using Left language as a way of legitimating itself. That language became hegemonic over the second half of the 20th century. The Right has understood that. Part of how it builds support for its project is to deploy that apparently common language to legitimate and stabilise a very different kind of project. Even in the West, the far Right uses the language of decolonisation to talk about defending itself from the invading immigrant hordes. When Brexit happened in the UK, it was celebrated by Brexiteers as a kind of anti-colonial gesture, in that finally the UK had sovereignty over its borders and could prevent unwanted outsiders from coming in or prevent colonialism by the European Union. All of these terms are being deployed in what is essentially a fantasy of colonisation by migrants, minorities, oppressed castes. In the West, the far right has this fear of the so-called ‘great replacement’ of white people by the black and brown masses. I think that is what is going on. Decolonisation is being co-opted, being hollowed out. It has become so hegemonic that everyone appeals to it to justify their favoured projects.

Your book is placed within a broader decolonial context, ranging from India to Ghana. It can be argued that at the time of independence, there was widespread anticolonial solidarity, propelled by the Nehruvian Indian state. Do you believe that this shared anticolonial identity is somehow dead and outside of academia and activist circles, our politics and public discourse no longer recognises the connections between, say India and South Africa? 

I think that at the level of the state, certainly that imagination, has really shrivelled up. I think that is not just a function of the BJP’s rise to power; I think it was happening from before that, you could say from the 1990s, with liberalisation. India was shedding its allegiance to many of the key precepts of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Third World coalition before that. Perhaps the embers of that project persist in projects like BRICS, but these are much more realist projects that bring together large Global South states for particular strategic purposes as a counterbalance to Western geopolitical power.

But if it survives at all, I think it survives in social movements – in the organised Left, but also in Left social movements outside of that space and now, perhaps more importantly, outside the organised left. I think an issue like Palestine is a very good index of where this spirit survives. If you look for who in India today is concerned about what's going on in Palestine, not the State of Israel but Palestine and Palestinian liberation. That’s a very good marker of where the spirit survives, who is still animated by it and what can still happen in its name.

Is it restricted to academic and activist circles? Maybe those are the nuclei of those kinds of mobilisations and protests. But I would like to think that there is a larger public that is attentive to these things, and I think it depends on where you are asking the question. If you ask the question in Kashmir or in Nagaland or the Northeast, you might get a very different answer to this issue of how and to what extent is that spirit alive. The answer is that the spirit is alive with the people who need it, the people who need solidarity, the people who need support, the people who are creating these alliances, who are invested in it. Because ultimately the spirit survives when you need it for your own liberation, not just solidarity as something that “we the fortunate” provide to those who need it. But as something that is tied up in our own liberation, in our own emancipation. Then if you think of the question like that, then perhaps it is actually alive in a much more widespread way in feminist and queer movements and in anti-caste movements.

The moment these movements start to think about questions of how our oppression is sustained and what alliances keep it in place is a breakthrough. Think about the Indian government’s connections with and its reliance on Israeli weapons and technology in order to maintain its stranglehold over the Indian nation itself. Whether that is the so-called anti-Maoist counterinsurgency or its occupation of Kashmir or its rule over different parts of the Northeast. There is lots of interesting work on how this is reliant on weapons. India is a huge purchaser of Israeli weapons, and you can also think of surveillance technologies like Pegasus. There was a big story about how this Israeli-developed surveillance was being used by governments all over the world, including India, to surveil the opposition.

Once those connections are made then it becomes much clearer who needs solidarity with whom, and then the logic of solidarity is also much more obvious. It is not just about a relic of 1950s non-alignment, it is something living and present and something we need today.

We were also thinking of this question precisely from the perspective of Palestine. We have had conversations about how drastically Indian foreign policy has changed towards Palestine and Israel. In context of what you said, I think protest posters were a very good record of these kinds of solidarity across the Third World and movements for decolonisation. Thank you for that.

[Note to Readers] To purchase The Psychic Lives of Statues directly from Pluto Press with a 20% discount, use code RAO20 at checkout. A paperback edition will be available soon.