Look Back In Awe

I remember a statue of Mahatma Gandhi I saw every day on my way to work in Ahmedabad. It was a formless sculpture set in a traffic island. Barely raised above the onslaught of pedestrians, at first sight it looked like one of the older office clerks trying to cross the road without being run over by an auto-rickshaw. The greatness of the man, the ideals he symbolised were not visible in the way it was conceived or placed. From the state of the statue, it was possible to gauge something of Gandhiji's new mood. The marble cheeks were discoloured by exhaust, a pall of dust from the  city's industrial units had settled into the bald head. And every morning the road cleaner swept aside packets of Charminar, Uncle Chipps and Baba Zarda from around the Mahatma's feet.

If public sculpture and architecture are meant to convey a sense of elation, spatial purpose and humanist interest, these qualities can hardly be found in statues planted in public parks, public parks planted in traffic islands, traffic islands maintained by multinational companies.

Years earlier, on a committee to decide on a sculptor for the commemoration of Indira Gandhi, I experienced something of the process that eulogised public figures. I had sat with the others while Rajiv made a selection from the sketches.

The first was easy to reject: Indira drawn in rough loose strokes. It was cast aside for poor draughtsman-ship. Another made the former PM look too old, yet another too young. Several Indiras came and went: frontal views, profiles, half Indiras, quarter Indiras, walking and sitting Indiras, pensive, thoughtful Indiras. No one could decide. Drawn into a family drama, even Rajiv looked confused. Till someone discovered a larger-than-life size Indira. Conceived in direct frontal view, the finger  was raised and wagging, the face grimacing downward, hectoring the masses. The portrait of a truly Indian leader.

How often we see these hectoring, sculpted reminders of our past, statues and structures perpetuating political memories. Are politics—and now cricket and film—the only avenues to national heroism in India? For the ordinary endeavours of running a nation fall on scientists, artists, plumbers and electricians—people unaffected by heroism. It is they who are the real heroes, the men and women of immediate purpose—those who manage to procure milk for their children during a dairy shortage; or those who successfully tackle the accounts section of the electricity department. The old measure of heroism was dated. National heroism was itself in bad taste. After 50 years the only heroes left were those on the ground; emasculated and withdrawn, struggling to keep the body from utter and total decay. It is they who need to be mounted on pedestals.

I, along with several others, was once part of a group to express individual design ideas for a Freedom Memorial. A single architect would define, and deify, the meaning of Freedom, to create in one grand symbolic gesture what it  would be for a billion people to live beyond the struggle for independence. So intoxicating was the idea, none amongst us was willing to question the grandiose plan. But, independence gained, was it really necessary for the collective conscience of a nation to remind itself that it was free? (Look son, there's Gandhiji on the Dandi March. Come let's go to MacDonald's.) Like the shaky confidence of socialist regimes that planted oversize hectoring statuary at street junctions, it was important to let the citizens know who they were, who was in charge.

Our own fears stem neither from the political paranoia of Communism, nor the flighty self-adulation of Western culture. It is a deeper, I think a more insidious fear, a despair perhaps linked to the loss of our past, a loss that may soon become permanent.

Gandhi, Gokhale, Bhave were men of another time. Not mine. Nor my children's. They were the circumstantial figures of a difficult political and historical terrain. The India of my inheritance owes them nothing more than the reverence accorded by history books for a job well done. I know if I need to live beyond their ambit, I require a painless disembowelment, an erasure of their malignant and, now, parasitic memory.

What is 50 years in the life of a nation? I too am 50 years old. But unlike India, my life is finite. With each passing year, my past enlarges, the future shortens. The books on my shelf, the collection of photos and other mementos remind me now of what I have done; less and less of what I can do. I pull them down occasionally, to stroll through these old half-remembered passages of my life. This is an indulgence of the old. Unfortunately, it has also become the sad predicament of a nation barely entering puberty. Where there may be a million fruitful decades ahead, it is easier to turn to the few golden nuggets in the crumbling wreckage. Convenient still to persist in the hope that their melancholic, sullied beauty will somehow enchant us again and again.