“The conundrum of the chicken and the egg
Was posed as which was the
mother?
If the egg begat the chicken and the chicken the egg
Then each begat one another.
Through to infinity it chased its tail
This conundrum with a question to beg
And though it was sinister and not a solution
The chicken one day swallowed the egg!”
From We Are Crying, Egypt, Crying by Bachchoo
I have now received two invitations to sign a petition against the raising of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Parliament Square, London. The statue was proposed by George Osborne, British Chancellor on his visit to India in June to commemorate 400 years of the Britain’s interaction with India. I haven’t signed the petitions. The campaigns opposing the statue are gathering momentum and will no doubt end in a futile demonstration when it is complete and unveiled.
Several statues stand in the square, which adjoins St. Margaret’s Church and Westminster Abbey on its side and from whose other side tourists can take photographs of Big Ben. A sizeable statue of Winston Churchill strolls towards the legislature on one plinth. The sculptor commissioned to provide the Gandhi statue, Phillip Jackson is known for his depiction in Green Park of the RAF Bomber Command heroes of the Second World War.
There isn’t any lasting irony in the fact that a sculptor who commemorates war heroes is to cast the statue of the man known as the apostle of non-violence though there may be some in the juxtaposition of Gandhi with Churchill, the staunch political opponent who called him “a naked fakir”. The Churchill statue faces Parliament so there is no chance that Jackson or the installing committee will get mischievous and place the Gandhi statue facing Winston, with its back to the British Parliament.
This commemoration by statue is, apart from being a mark of respect, the act of history putting a marker down on the soil — history becoming geography, just as the naming of streets after people is.
The opposite is also true. Statues are desecrated to symbolically erase history as happened with the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down by dissenters in Baghdad after the US and UK troops had made it safe for them to so do. I also recall having visited Budapest some years ago and taking a dusty bus ride to a remote and unceremonious compound “museum” to which the statues of Lenin, Stalin and other Communists, Hungarians included, which had stood in the city had been banished. Their humble exile to this museum of disgrace marked the passing of the era of Russian dominance over Hungary. The shop at the museum, celebrating the anti-communist era sold trashy souvenirs of Stalin keychains and Soviet-era postcards. I bought some to send to my Trotskyist and capitalistic friends.
In Pune, my hometown, the British-Raj-christened “Main Street”, named for its functionality was renamed Mahatma Gandhi Road after Independence, as were the Main streets and Malls (“maal roat”) of most Indian cities. Local geography commemorated the historical personality. Most British names disappeared and the names of Indian personages, some of them significant and deserving and others obscure and serving the ego of some family or some municipal legislator, replaced them.
Even so, in Mumbai (Bombay) the taxi drivers can take you without question to “Flora Fountain” without reference to what the best-known plaza or square of south Mumbai has been named by patriotic local councillors.
So also the magnificent Gothic edifice, which is now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, some old time Mumbaikars (Parsis?) still refer to it as “Victoria Station”, but mostly as “Bori Bunder” — “the landing of sacks”.
New Delhi is cosmopolitan rather than narrowly regionalist. There is an August Kranti Marg which I’ve always thought commemorates a Russian uprising. Then there’s the Archbishop Makarios Avenue, a tribute to a leader of what the Nehru generation called “The Third World”.
There are four strands of opposition to the Gandhi statue being erected and they don’t seem to have come together as a single campaign. Some Labour politicians, led by Lord John Prescott, former deputy Prime Minister in the Blair government, claims that Mr Osborne and the Tories are sucking up to India because they want to sell British-made missiles to the Indian armed forces. He points to the irony of using the man of non-violence to peddle armaments.
Then there are those who feel that Parliament Square ought to be reserved for British heroes and it’s not right to have Johnny-foreigner gracing the streets and squares of the sceptred isle. Thirdly, the Sikh Federation of the UK has written to Mr Osborne and to the proposed sculptor to point out that Gandhi was in their words “a racist towards black people, with paedophilic tendencies and diehard support for the discriminatory Hindu caste system.” Strong words.
Then there’s eye-surgeon Kusoom Vadgama, founder of the Indo-British Heritage Trust who labels the proposal for the statue an “affront” to Indian women because Gandhi has in his own writings described or confessed his experiments in celibacy and self-control which consisted of sleeping in the same bed as his nieces and grand-niece and refraining from any physical contact. Ms Vadgama with perfect logic and faultless compassion, characterises this “test”, as extreme perversion and a violation of the rights of the young women, despite the fact that they consented to take part in the Mahatma’s “experiments with truth”.
Whether the accusation that Gandhi was a diehard supporter of caste or indeed a racist can be borne out by the facts is and has been debatable. Nevertheless, Ms Vadgama and the Sikh Federation are, in a democracy, entitled to cast that first stone.
Apart from that of Churchill, there is also a statue of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square and of course a statue of Horatio Nelson atop the column in Trafalgar Square. An examination of their private lives may and should give the Sikh Federation and Ms Vadgama serious cause for concern.
