The great Indian eyesore: Spare us the super-sized Sardar Patel

Of the many places I never want to visit in my lifetime, Mount Rushmore is right there at the top of the list. I’ve never quite grasped the appeal of staring at gargantuan faces of dead white men carved into the side of a canyon. Unattractive dead white men, at that. And yet, year after year, Americans flock to gaze these stone-faced travesties with faithful regularity, hence fulfilling the project’s original purpose, ie. to drum up tourism for the otherwise boring state of South Dakota. Patriotism moves us in mysterious ways. Hence, Narendra Modi’s dream of building a 600-foot statue of our Founding Father Sardar Patel on an island off the Narmada Dam. Needless to say, I am no more enthused at the prospect of gazing on Patelji’s gargantuan visage than that of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Nothing ruins a vacation quite like bad scenery. [caption id=“attachment_1339451” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The Sardar Patel statue[/caption] Many will dismiss such an objection to the project as shallow. What about more pressing issues like potential environmental destruction and waste of public funds, critics will ask. How dare I deride a tribute to a revered national icon based purely on aesthetics, its supporters will thunder. To the latter I say, Patel – who is long dead and gone – isn’t in any need of this kind of obesiance. His place in history and in our national memory remains intact, with or without the expenditure of Rs 2,500 crores. Just as Mayawati’s place in UP history remains precarious despite her her giant-sized doppelgängers dotting the UP landscape. Memorials are important, but Patel’s national stature doesn’t need to be literally reflected in the size of his statue. As for the business of environmental destruction, the Patel statue is not and will not be the worst thing that happened to the Gujarat coastline. Far worse has already been done in the name of  development. But what would make this project and its costs more palatable to my inner taxpayer is if it were indeed democratically mandated and financed. Merely collecting scrap metal from aam aadmi households, as Modi envisions, is cute but insufficient. This is still a top-down expenditure of public funds, and it isn’t unpatriotic to question its usefulness, especially at a time of economic anxiety. The now-beloved Statue of Liberty almost did not materialise because the American government was reluctant to finance even its part of the deal – which was merely to construct the pedestal for French statue. The New York Times at the time declared that “no true patriot can countenance any such expenditures for bronze females in the present state of our finances.” After attempts to secure state and federal funding failed, the project was ultimately made possible through private fundraising that spanned wealthy donors and ordinary New Yorkers, including a drive launched by media mogul Joseph Pulitzer. There’s no reason why the principle shouldn’t remain the same today. Those who want the statue should pay for it, be it the BJP party or Narendra Modi (more likely their supporters) or even non-partisan Patel devotees. If this is indeed Modi’s personal dream to quite literally construct a Loha Purush, why allow, as Bhatia describes it, “the sheer audacity of public expenditure and the grotesque misuse of political power to electoral ends” to mar its fulfillment? Of course, none of this will change the unavoidable fact of its ugliness. A fact that is the unspoken, unpalatable elephant in the room, which is why it is worth underlining. Government-funded public art in this country is remarkable only for its blithe indifference to aesthetics. Look around you: We specialise in ugly. Nothing about the depictions of the proposed statue makes me hope for otherwise. And what truly alarms me is the very real possibility that the so-called Statue of Unity may be the first step toward a coastline of horrors, as Gautam Bhatia warns in his Times of India op-ed: Besides Lucknow’s numerous Mayawatis and Ambedkars, some years back the Maharashtra government came up with a giant commemoration of Shivaji, a 310-foot-high statue set a mile into the Arabian Sea, a project now given an environmental nod. Is Kolkata then likely to ask for a 700-foot-high Mother Teresa in the Bay of Bengal? Will Tamil Nadu propose a 900-foot-high MGR along the coastline? Or Kerala a 1,000-foot Vasco da Gama? It is just a matter of time. This list of impending perils doesn’t include other potential land-locked catastrophes including, say, a giant likeness of Nehru carved out of the Himalayas. We will soon be spending all our holidays under the panoptic gaze of some long dead luminary ruining our view, each looming ever larger than the other. And that is one big reason why citing that other American monument, the diminutive 305-foot Statue of Liberty, doesn’t quite justify the great Patel project. Say what you will about Lady Liberty, she is, at least, easy on the eye. And for that blessing, New Yorkers ought to give daily thanks to the French who were kind enough to conceive of their gift in symbolic not literal terms. Hence, the pretty Roman goddess of freedom as opposed to some dead revolutionary. The harsh reality is that no flesh-and-blood human being looks attractive when super-sized, McDonald’s style. Not Patel or Gandhi or Nehru or Mother Teresa. The Buddha comes close, but he is more symbolic than real, softened instead by religious iconography. If we must erect monstrous statues, better a Saraswati or even an inspired remaining of Mother India. But spare us a 600-foot version of a dead leader, however beloved or revered. That said, I don’t expect a modest – if unassailable – argument about aesthetics to nix this hallowed endeavour, not with such weighty political calculations arrayed in its favour. But that’s alright. the island of Sadhu Bet will end up where it belongs, alongside Mount Rushmore as just one more eyesore on my do-not-visit list.