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

In the second part of our conversation with Dr Rahul Rao, we turn to India. We explore the politics around statues in India from the vantage point of a generational shift in student and Dalit politics. We end with a discussion on other forms of anti-colonialism and their implications for pushing forward progressive politics. 

The full interview can be watched on YouTube. Part I of the conversation can be read here.

Similar to universities in the West, Indian universities have also become sites of contestations around statues. We think of JNU’s Vivekananda statue to protests over Savarkar busts. We wonder if this is a student-led reconfiguration of India’s iconographic memory. What does this tell us about generational shifts in how historical figures are read and remembered in India? Do you note any convergences or divergences in the methods and rhetoric employed by Indian students when compared with their counterparts elsewhere?

The period during which I paid most attention to this was during the anti-CAA-NRC protests where students were at the forefront in institutions like Jamia to begin with, and then much more widely. Of course, what was really noticeable in those protests was the deployment of stalwarts of the Indian political canon and symbols of Indian nationalism as a way of shaming the state. I wrote an article called Nationalism against the State which was trying to think through how the protesters, both students and non-student protesters, were using Indian anti-colonial icons primarily Ambedkar but also Phule and also not just the sort of hegemonic dominant caste figures like Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, but a set of figures who did not receive their due in the authorised history of the nation state in the first decades of the republic.

I am trying to think of the images that were most prominent because there was so much iconography also around this. The deployment of the Constitution as a weapon with which to push the state in the directions it ought to be moving in. It was as if the nation was trying to shame the state into remembering the promises that it had betrayed, the promises that it had made to the nation that it had betrayed. I used this idea from David Lloyd of ‘nationalism against the state’ to try and understand what was happening during these protests. He develops it in a different context.

Of course, this also has limits, so sometimes I am a bit sceptical of this love affair with the Constitution. We have the assumption that it can solve all problems. I am thinking of secessionist struggles in particular, places that do not wish to be governed by that Constitution. Then the Constitution may not have all the answers, so there are limits to what a constitutional solution can deliver. That said, the constitution is so capacious and in some respects so underutilised that it is certainly a very important tool in this struggle. But all of these things, I think, are quite distinctive to the Indian context.

I think probably the US is a good comparison because there is a kind of constitutional patriotism there that has been around for a long time. We see appeals to First Amendment rights, in the context of all of these struggles, so maybe there is some similarity there. But certainly not in the UK where there is a written constitution, but it is not written in any one place and so it does not have the same kind of centrality and the same emotional purchase that constitutions have. The UK has also never had a revolution, so there is not a kind of canon of thinkers to appeal to in the same way as there is in places like South Africa or India for that matter.

But I think there is also a very clear revision of the canon underway and in the book, I try and explore this most closely with reference to Gandhi, whose statues have been under attack all over the world for very different reasons. In the chapter on Gandhi, I talk about the different sources of that attack, whether it’s African student movements that are trying to decolonize the academy or an Afro-pessimist discourse that sees the key racial fault line as not white versus everyone else, but black versus everyone else, where other people of colour, for example, Gandhi become problematic as partners to white supremacy. And to the globalization of the Dalit movement, whose critique is now global and no longer confined to India. Then, of course, there is a very different critique of Gandhi from the Hindu Right that always has been around and continues to be. It is the reason he was killed. It continues to be echoed, revived and remembered on the anniversary of his assassination, which is celebrated by followers of his assassin Nathuram Godse who is celebrated by the Right. Savarkar (Godse’s intellectual mentor) has now been elevated to a position of respectability in the Indian pantheon. His image is displayed in Parliament, his statues and busts are all over the place. The obeisance that political leaders pay to him and the way in which his famous text, ‘Essentials of Hindutva’ has become a kind of alt-constitution, an alternative constitution for the Hindu Right, as his ideas structure their imagination and animate their rhetoric to this day.

There is a revision, there is a struggle over the canon. I think in the centre of all this is Ambedkar, whom everybody wants, including the Hindu Right. I have not yet read Anand Teltumbde's biography, which actually came out just after my book went to press. But I am really intrigued by his treatment of Ambedkar because he is one of his foremost interpreters, but he is also very critical of this appropriation of Ambedkar and the sort of hollowing out of Ambedkar’s radicality by these different voices vying for Ambedkar. In that sense, Ambedkar is like the term “decolonisation” which everybody wants a piece of, everyone claims to inhabit, everybody appeals to as a way of legitimating their respective projects.

Defenders of the retention of statues of colonial figures claim that it is an important marker of history, as contested as it may be. For instance, UK’s ‘Retain and Explain’ policy. How do you imagine an anticolonial pedagogy which may be used to respond to this?

It is a really important issue to address because this is probably the most common argument that those who are in favour of keeping problematic memorials in place make: that removing them would erase history. I think the most decisive responses have been offered in the US context, where many historians have pointed out that Confederate statues tended to be built not in the immediate aftermath of the US Civil War which ended with the defeat of the South by the North. Southern states were too poor to go around building these huge monuments and memorials. They really come up in two waves, fifty years and a hundred years after the Civil War, in periods when African Americans were making significant advances. The statues are put up as part of a white supremacist backlash as a way of saying “No, we're not going to let you advance” and “We're going to remind you of who owns this place and who is dominant.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center did a census of the statues, dating them and demonstrating these two waves very clearly. These statues are not innocent historical markers. They are actually acts of propaganda. When you think about it, perhaps all statues are because it takes an enormous amount of money and material wherewithal to build a statue. Statue entrepreneurs tend to be – not always – but they tend to be people in some kind of position of power who can claim space and who have the wherewithal to erect these symbols. That means that they tend to be symbols of propaganda rather than history teaching.

In that sense, the struggles over the statues help us to tell a much more honest history. And so I would say that preserving the memory of those struggles is in some ways more important than keeping the statue intact. For example, one of the most famous topplings in 2020 was the statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader in Bristol. The city of Bristol is plastered with memorialisations to Colston because he was supposedly a big philanthropist. That statue was toppled in June 2020 and the defaced statue is now displayed in a museum, which I think tells a much more honest history about the figure than the original statue standing in Bristol, claiming that this person was a “wise and virtuous son of Bristol”, as it said before.

The toppling and defacement and preserving the memory of those things can end up telling a much more honest history about the very figure being commemorated, than the sort of pristine figure of the statue. In other words, the toppling and the defacement is the anticolonial pedagogy, and that is the thing that should be preserved.

I was also really struck while working on this book by the images of anti-racist protesters bringing down these statues. It was very interesting to see what they did to them. They often did to the statues what the figures represented by those statues did to other people to begin with. Statues of Confederate soldiers were strung up from lampposts, which reminds us about lynching. Statues of Columbus were beheaded and burnt. Statues of Colston were drowned like enslaved people who were drowned when they were thrown overboard. In a way, we were being reminded of these historical processes of oppression in the act of protest itself.

It is very interesting to think about the telling of the fuller story of the statue as anti-colonial pedagogy. There is something to say about the usage of violence by anti-racist protesters in these public acts of statue toppling. I am thinking about Fanon’s first chapter ("Concerning Violence”) from The Wretched of the Earth on the uses of violence in anti-colonial resistance. Popular perceptions of these movements have been of widespread criticism and disdain, framing them as undignified. How do you make sense of this?

There is a presumption that the public sphere is one in which we relate to each other as equals. If that were true, then these notions of civility and public decency would make a lot of sense.

What they end up being is a coded way of preserving the status quo because we know that marginalised groups do not enjoy the same share of the public sphere in the way that we presume and so it is necessary often to storm that public sphere to trespass into it, to go into places where they do not belong. That is often read as rudeness, incivility, unruly behaviour and punished by the law or by social disapproval.

There is also a suggestion that student protests exhibit juvenile behaviour, that students haven't understood what they've really come to university for. We hear this kind of language a lot from university administrators all over the world, that students ought to be sitting in class studying. It also betrays a different vision of what the university is for, what university education is for, which becomes less about preparing people for citizenship and becomes much more instrumental, about learning a set of technical knowledges and skills that can be deployed in the market to earn a living, which of course is also very important, but ends up producing docile capitalist subjects rather than active and engaged citizens who might ask difficult questions.

Of course, Fanon was writing in a settler colonial context where this unruliness manifested in violence. Fanon is often read as justifying violence. I think David Macey, one of his most astute biographers makes a really interesting point in which he says it is meaningless to say ‘he is for’ or ‘he is against’ violence. What Fanon is is a theorist of violence and what he is arguing in that first chapter and in The Wretched of the Earth as a whole is that violence is so all pervasive in the settler colony, it is so inescapable. Every interaction involves it in some way, from the perspective of the native, that the use of violence is not a choice. It is a compulsion that is thrust on the native if he or she or they are to transform their situation in any way. I think that's to me a more interesting and useful way to think through Fanon and his position on violence than the usual ‘is he for it, is he against it.’ We juxtapose him with Gandhi and sort of think of them as contrasts. But perhaps what we need to think about is that they are inhabiting very different colonial situations in which the tools and techniques have to be very different. The tools of anticolonialism have to be very different.

Your book’s focus is on countries historically marked by exploitation and colonialism, where the colonial power has now been ousted from the state, and popular claiming of public space through statues is largely psychic and symbolic. On the other hand, Israeli settler colonialism shows a markedly different scenario, where it is the occupying power that lays claim to statue symbolism and public spaces — such as, for example, in its toppling of Qasim Solemani’s statue in Lebanon. Is there something to be said about constraints posed by settler colonialism on dramatic gestures like statue toppling? Do all colonialisms lend themselves, in the end, to such displays? 

That is a great question. Firstly, the idea of the ‘ending’ of colonisation is very interesting in itself. How do we know whether colonialism has ended? Saidiya Hartman uses this term ‘afterlives’ quite a lot in her work to question the notion of endings. We might have independence, but African political theorists often call it ‘flag independence’ to remind us that all that happened was you got a new flag but the transfer of power is often a very shallow thing.

In many contexts, terms like ‘neo-colonialism’ were coined to show that despite the appearance of ending, many structures stayed the same, such as economic imperialism and so forth. I would question the notion of an end even in places where there have been formal proclamations of independence or emancipation.

This matters in all the contexts I have written about. It matters in South Africa, where the students were saying, yes, apartheid ended formally in 1994, but the legacies of it are still with us. It matters in the United States where, yes, there was an Emancipation Proclamation, but the afterlives of slavery are still felt in institutional racism, such as in policing, healthcare, universities, and other public institutions. It also matters in the Indian context, in terms of caste where we have the abolition of untouchability, but the caste system persists and so does untouchability. The end is nowhere in sight, and in many ways, these struggles are struggles to bring about an end that has not yet happened.

All that said, there is something distinctive about settler colonialism, which makes it different from colonialism without qualification. That difference is usually glossed through Patrick Wolfe’s definition, where he defines settler colonialism as the elimination of the native, different from simply colonialism as the exploitation of the native. Colonialism exploits the native for their labour, whereas settler colonialism seeks to eliminate the native in order to access land and resources, to found a settler colonial nation in which the settler becomes the new native. Now, of course these are heuristic distinctions, and most situations probably involve elements of both exploitation and elimination, but the balance between these things tends to differ. What makes the Israel-Palestine case distinctive is that this process of elimination is unfolding before our eyes, on our TV screens, on our digital devices.

That is why there is this enormous global investment, on the part of anti-colonialists, to stop it, to throw sand in the wheels of the machine that keeps it happening. It is such an overwhelming phenomenon. We are sitting here now in the aftermath of a so-called ceasefire that was supposed to have paused some of this, but actually, it continues even more relentlessly, because now it feels as if the collective opposition has become tired, exhausted. Not just by the Israeli state but by the support given to it by the US from January onwards. The stakes are very, very high and very clear.

When we speak of counterpublics and assertions over public space, Mayawati's wide-scale architectural projects come to mind, and so does the deep discomfort and criticism this generated from upper caste groups, who often spoke of this as a drain of public money. How do you make sense of this? Do you believe this adds a fresh dimension to anticolonial movements situated around public iconography?

I think Dalit statue building is a really important phenomenon and an instance of how statue building might be emancipatory,  because it is a phenomenon in which the building of a statue of Ambedkar is a way of claiming space, often in contexts where Dalit communities have been denied access to public land. It is a way of asserting dignity, a way of asserting pride, and a way of reminding Savarna audiences of the debt they owe to Ambedkar, as founder of the Indian Constitution. Most of these images of Ambedkar show him holding the Constitution.

What Mayawati does is to turbocharge this process, to carry it out on an exponentially grander scale during her brief tenures as Chief Minister of UP. For the first time, possibly in the history of India, you see the memorialisation of the Dalit presence on a scale that can rival the Mughals, Lutyens, and all these previous empires.

Many scholars who have studied these forms of memorialisation have noted, and I agree, that the grandeur of these projects was a kind of future-proofing, a kind of insurance against their possible vandalisation, which we know happens all too often. Ambedkar statues are often desecrated or caged or brought down. The sheer grandeur of these memorials, particularly of the Lucknow memorials, was a way of safeguarding them against such future attacks, especially when the BSP would lose power.

As you note, there has been a lot of Savarna criticism of this. A lot of that criticism is quite hypocritical, because Savarna groups have spent lavish amounts of money building their own statues and memorials. We can see this in the statues of the Hindu Right, and in grandiose projects of Hindu revivalism.

But that said, criticism of Mayawati’s statue-building has also come from people like Anand Teltumbde, whose criticism is very different from the Savarna criticism. Teltumbde rightly points out that the Savarna criticism is hypocritical because Mayawati has only done what all other Indian politicians have done. But he argues that she could have used these symbols as a way of materially redistributing resources to Dalit communities. Instead, her symbolism catapults a small section of the Dalit community into power, often in alliance with Brahmins. As we know, she has made a series of opportunistic alliances to come to power in UP. Teltumbde offers a broader critique of how Ambedkar has been opportunistically instrumentalised, not only by Savarnas but also by Dalit elites. I suppose all this is to say that there is both a legitimate and an illegitimate critique of Mayawati’s projects, and it is really important how we situate those critiques.

Continuing to think from the last question, we are also curious about how you think of the differences in more organic, local celebrations or everyday forms of living around Dalit statues, like those of Ambedkar or Phule. How do you think about the differences between these forms of engagement and more state-led projects such as Mayawati’s?

I think there is probably quite a big difference between those projects. Nicolas Jaoul has a really great paper on this grassroots Ambedkar statue building in UP from the 1960s onwards. These statues were being built and it reached a high point when the BSP came to power. He argues that many of these early Ambedkar statue building projects were very humble, grassroots initiatives. First, within the village or the town, the Dalit community had to get itself organised. You had mobilization committees forming because the task of building a statue required raising money, finding land, collective mobilization, and unity. In some way, that is really the most important thing,  more important than the artifact that results from that endeavour.

He also talks about how in inaugurating these statues, often the local Dalit community would invite a VIP – typically Dalit government servant or politician – which allowed them to build alliances with people in the state apparatus, which then becomes useful later on for all kinds of practical material purposes. That is what grassroots Ambedkarite mobilisation around statues looks like. I would suggest that it can often leave a longer legacy,  in terms of community-building, organisation, and mobilisation, than top-down state initiatives, which are very reliant on having a Dalit party in power. Those kinds of initiatives can often be reversed by a hostile government that comes to power later.

As I was saying earlier, Mayawati was probably aware of that danger, and therefore built these memorials on an immense scale that is harder to dismantle. But in some ways, that grandeur leaves less of a legacy of grassroots mobilisation and unity than the more organic, bottom-up approach.

That said, these things are connected, because the BSP came to power at the state level only as a result of those earlier grassroots mobilisations. So there is also a connection between those two projects that we can't ignore.

You argue that, in a modern-day form of proselytisation, upper caste Hindus responded to Dalit claims over the public sphere by building Hindu religious statues at a fast pace and in large numbers. Symbols of nationalist figures, like Sardar Patel, also become a part of this expansive project of statue building. How do you think capital and the Hindu right interact in the statue-building project, in terms of a show of strength, wealth, and a projection of the might of the great Hindu Nation? What is this imagination built at the cost of? 

The most theoretically sophisticated answer to that question has been given by Kajri Jain in her book Gods in the Time of Democracy, which anyone interested in monumental statue building in India should read. She traces a long twentieth-century history of statue building in India, beginning in the late nineteenth century with British colonial governmentality, when the colonial state began governing the body politic through the notion of ‘communities’, conducting censuses, initiating provincial legislative assemblies and elections. Communities became acutely aware of themselves as communities and of the politics of numbers. She describes how communities often consolidated themselves around icons, a phenomenon she calls ‘iconopraxis’. One important movement during this time was the temple entry movements by subordinate castes and Dalits, who were denied access to Hindu temples. Jain argues that the Hindu response was not to open temple doors, but to bring the icons out, in processions. This is how events like Ganapati Utsav in Maharashtra and Durga Puja in Bengal became prominent. The procession of the icon became a way of marking territory for a community, of consolidating a public around it. Of course, Dalits also engaged in iconopraxis, but their more familiar form became the building of Ambedkar statues, which took off in subsequent decades.

Then, she argues, in the 1980s and ‘90s, we see a different phenomenon. This is the moment of liberalization: industries like cement, automobiles, and road building are booming, and real estate and construction are expanding rapidly. Jain suggests that iconic statue building picks up here as a way of marking out space for new peri-urban and urban development. Anyone who has driven out of an Indian city into its peri-urban sprawl would have seen it, you are lost, and then suddenly there's a giant statue by the highway. She argues that these are early signs of real estate encroachment onto common lands, the statue acting as a preliminary move in a land grab.

This is a key moment when capital, the ascent of the Hindu right, and neoliberalism’s hunger for resources begin to converge. Statues become instruments for occupying land in preparation for large capitalist urban projects. It is a much more sophisticated argument than I can fully do justice to here, but I think those conjoined processes of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s are crucial for understanding how the Hindu right and neoliberal capital began to come together.

Remember, this is also the moment of the Mandir-Mandal mobilisations: the movement for the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, and the reaction against the Mandal Commission’s expansion of OBC reservations. All of this is happening simultaneously,  and it’s also when the Hindu right starts building icons and symbols on an ever more gigantic scale, often in response to Dalit community mobilisations.

One culmination of this, I argue in the book, is the Statue of Unity, the tallest statue in the world, built on the site of the Narmada Dam. The dam itself, as all Indian readers will know, has been the site of a long and iconic struggle against land and water resource appropriation in the Narmada Valley, displacing between a quarter of a million and a million people, overwhelmingly Adivasis. The statue, built on the site of the dam’s project offices, displaced even more people, particularly from the Tadvi community. This statue brings together the ambitions of the Hindu right, the lionisation of Sardar Patel, the ‘Iron Man’ who welded India together (and whom Modi models himself on, calling himself a Chhote Sardar), and the capitalist ambitions of the Hindu right.

Because if you think about it, what is the Narmada Dam? It is a mechanism for extracting resources from the valley and redistributing them, resources that historically sustained local populations, to agro-capitalists and urban areas across Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra. I am simplifying a much more complex story, but essentially, it is a gigantic project of extractive capitalism, and the Statue of Unity stands as its triumphant capstone.

As a footnote, I’d add: the statue cost around Rs. 3000 crores. Shockingly, some of that funding came from the corporate social responsibility budgets of public sector companies, an absolutely scandalous move, because it is hard to see what genuine social responsibility was served beyond the lionisation of the Hindu right’s favoured icons.

For our last set of questions, we want to think through these movements that we find ourselves in and your ideas to think of what we can do in the ways ahead. Statues, as your work notes, are both erected and brought down, as forms of resistance. While of course their very existence means they are unavoidable and must be reckoned with, but is there something in the very medium of statues that inherently binds them to hierarchy, and can resistance be instead channelised through other forms of iconography, like digital, performative, or a third new thing?

Some people think that the statue form is inherently problematic, that there is something inherently limiting, colonising almost, in the way a statue freezes a person, and not just a person, but the very act of honouring a person, in time. That can be problematic because our evaluation of that person may shift in response to changing social mores and the changing balance of forces in society. Our understanding of right and wrong might shift; our evaluation of a figure’s actions might change. But the statue freezes this act of honouring in time, insulates the figure from critique, and puts them up on a pedestal. Some argue that the statue as a form is inherently problematic because it freezes our attitudes.

I think that is true, but there are ways in which we have displayed statues that can change that view. We were talking earlier about action against statues such as defacement, graffiti, and so on. In some ways, all of these show how our attitudes are changing. Preserving these changes can actually end up telling a changing story. That does not always happen because authorities are usually very anxious to preserve the statue as it originally was, rather than allowing those marks to be displayed. It takes a lot of work to convince authorities to allow these marks to remain. Many people talk about  ‘contextualisation’ as a way of squaring this circle – yes, our attitude towards the statue may change, so we recontextualise it. I think there is some value in that, but also real limits. Many of these statues are grand structures built on massive plinths, elevated to inspire awe. What is a small plaque with size 12 font writing at the bottom really going to do to disrupt that aesthetic? Many people may not even notice it.

What I find really interesting is the new forms of memorialisation we are beginning to see, where the human figure is not central. For example, in many European cities, you find stumbling stones embedded in pavements. Little brass plates outside the houses from which Jews were taken to concentration camps, marking their names and dates of birth, detention and death. They are called stumbling stones because you don't necessarily see them, you literally stumble over them. Or, a few years ago, I visited a park in Buenos Aires. Argentina lived through a period of military dictatorship when many people were disappeared. They have innovative ways of memorialising the disappeared, not necessarily through figurative sculpture, but through walls of names, through memorial parks that tell the history of the country symbolically. The human figure is often absent, fittingly, because in the context of the disappeared, the body is precisely what is missing. The use of non-figurative forms of memorialisation in such cases is very powerful.

Then, of course, you mentioned the digital. One of the most iconic moments during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. involved giant light projections, like George Floyd’s face, BLM logos, onto Confederate statues in Richmond, Virginia. The statue became a canvas for telling a new story. And when you think about it, this kind of protest doesn’t necessarily require vast material infrastructure. Of course, it requires a projection device and careful planning, but in terms of capital, it is much less intensive than constructing a statue, and possibly more powerful and effective for it. There is an infinite range of possibilities. What is exciting is that the need for memorialisation persists, but if the statue isn’t the right medium, we must think creatively about what other forms we can use.

You mentioned how the centrality of the human figure is not necessary for memorialisation. In the same breath, for the last question I want to ask how the conversation around statues can be extended to other tangible anti-colonial forms of action? Do you think the conversation around statues has helped push the needle elsewhere, like with the toppling of Lord Nelson’s statue in Barbados, which, after many steps, led to displacement of colonial rule?

That is a great example of how statue protests have been part of larger movements. Almost all the statue protests I am aware of, whether anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-apartheid, have used the statue as a symbol, a metaphor, a doorway into a larger conversation about structural injustice. Whether it was Rhodes Must Fall thinking about the legacies of apartheid in the academy, or Black Lives Matter thinking about institutional racism and policing, or even the way COVID exposed racial and caste disparities, in all these, statues were a way to start deeper conversations about material, institutional racism and casteism.

The problem is that we often got stuck on the statue itself. We got hung up on the question: Should it stand or fall, as if that was the end of the story. It wasn’t. Protesters were using statues to open the door to broader conversations. Sometimes those conversations happened; sometimes they didn’t. In South Africa, for instance, the Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town was taken down within a month. Afterwards, the university effectively said: We’ve given you what you want, go home. It was used to demobilise, to shut down further demands. There's a great article by Tuli Gamedze in Radical Philosophy about this co-optation.

Conversely, in places where statues weren't removed, the issue remained alive , keeping conversations about systemic racism alive too. That’s not to say that protests where statues were removed failed, they succeeded in all kinds of ways. But the key point is that the link between the statue and the deeper material stakes must be maintained if we want to push the needle in progressive directions.

Thank you very much for that. Just before we conclude, we had a question about when a South Asian copy of the book will hopefully come out.

Despite my best efforts, there is no separate South Asian edition. However, I do have a discount code if you buy directly from Pluto Press and use the code RAO20, it will give you 20% off the hardback. That is valid for a year. There will also be a paperback edition in about a year, which will be much cheaper and hopefully make the book more accessible in India. 

[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.