A bid for memorialization: Negotiating public memory

Abstract

In March 2018, following the defeat of the Left Front by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led alliance in the Assembly elections in Tripura, India, one witnessed the demolition of Lenin’s statue in South Tripura amidst cries of, ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai!’. The Tripura governor, as a response, tweeted – ‘[w]‌hat one democratically elected government can do another democratically elected government can undo, and vice versa’ (Karmakar 2018: n.pag.). In May 2019, newspaper reports stated that workers from the right-wing political organization, BJP had defaced a statue of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in Vidyasagar College, Kolkata, India. Of the many criticisms levelled against this incident, one in particular took a nativist and elitist tone and posited that the rally consisted of ‘outsiders’, i.e., people from the neighbouring states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand. As these ‘outsiders’ were not cognizant of Vidyasagar’s contributions to the sociocultural and political fabric of West Bengal, it made them more prone to committing said acts of vandalism. To that end, this article will closely examine the contemporary debates concerning the vandalism and restoration of statues in South Asia, which brings up pertinent questions regarding state power and the narratives propagated in the daily lives of its citizens and the iconographic function of statues which allows for communities, both real and imagined to rally around it. As structures of cultural, religious and political significance rise to the fore with increasing frequency, debates on their utility, significance, allegiance and symbolism are burgeoning with multiple meanings. To that end, in an attempt to historicize said events it is imperative to unpack the categories of culture, religious and political representation and what goes into their production in order to better address the questions: ‘Who is represented?’ and ‘[w]ho gets to represent?’. This article will locate the discussion around how statues are related at once to the mundane, the local and the national and when they are vandalized, how are discourses around communities affected as a result within the contours of cultural and religio-political representation.