Statues Tall When They Fall
…Sceptre and Crown Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With poor crooked scythe and spade. Only the actions of the just Small sweet and blossom in their dust.
Years ago I wrote an essay on why the bust will survive the city. Today, even as archeologists are digging up ancient ruins to find the human route to civilisation, the statues which adorned many a city and cobbled streets are being toppled.
Many are under serious public scrutiny as people dig out the dirty linens of history by some of our revered ‘heroes’ whose life chimes with those cruel times.
Many were despots, slave owners, tyrants, dictators and those who abused and suppressed some part of our humanity with most brutal means.
Black Lives Matter movement
Black Lives Matter, BLM, marches have brought all this to a crescendo and the sight of statues being so unceremoniously rolled down the streets like rubbish bins is not an uplifting sight.
Push these into the rubbish bin of history, where they belong, seems the catch-cry of many.
No time is better than this contagion: COVID-19. It’s this virus that is not only affecting our daily reality but it’s turning the pages of history to be re- read as a man’s memory rejuvenates just before he faces death.
The mental anguish of COVID-19 will take us a generation or two to understand: it will make us dig our own lives as Death makes us read and re-read texts that the living created for us to face this one fatal reality.
This, I hope, is not seen as a pessimistic view: it is what great upheavals in human affairs do. The world, though , is born anew with a new light and message.
The crucifixion and resurrection seem part of that metaphor.
is the most apocalyptic endgame of our existential fate: the Bhagwadgita is its preamble. The current tragedy enveloping the whole world is a time for contemplation and critical evaluation of our modern civilisation.
These thoughts come to my mind as I’m writing a rather long essay for a book on Mahatma Gandhi to be published from Washington: I mention Washington advisedly. My editor-friend, who teaches there, has written only today: ‘the work of ours will be weighty and relevant--so crucial in India and for the world’.
Gandhi is not an easy subject: he questions all your assumptions and fixed ideas. His book, Hind Swaraj, written in 10 days on a ship, SS Kildonan Castle, is a classic of its genre: it is a severe indictment of European civilisation at its peak. The volume was published in 1909 and promptly banned by the British Raj. It was composed when Gandhi was returning from London to Durban where he spent twenty years fighting against racial prejudice and significantly changed the world in its relentless pursuit of life and liberty, greed and aggrandisement.
He considered western civilisation self-destructive with its brute colonisation but not beyond redemption by its Christian ethics, although he knew that Christianity, like all religions, was complicit in exploitation.
He believed that there’s a possibility of a better world even as Europe was marching towards a chasm on the road of immorality after immorality.
Within five years of the publication of the volume, Europe was plunged in that devastatingly destructive war from which it has never recovered.
Brexit is simply a footnote to that historical suicide of a mighty civilisation and the world’s greatest but very brief Empire. Joseph Conrad great short novel Heart Of Darkness was not about Africa: it was more about Europe.
When Gandhi’s book was published one professor was writing: Britain controls today the destinies of some 350,000,000 alien people, unable yet to govern themselves. Within 40 years the empire that governed roughly ‘a quarter of the world’s population, covered about the same proportions of the land’s surface and dominated nearly all oceans’, unravelled .
Today many monuments of kings and queens lie upon one another in obscure museums, gathering dust and eaten by rust and rats.
How the mighty have fallen is best shown in sharp steel images in the demolition of some of the statues in the current crisis.
As if people are asking for a new evaluation of our historical past in the context of new knowledge and perspectives on history itself.
Dig but how deep do you want to dig?
And it’s not only history’s distorted truth that is being questioned: it’s our democracies, our economic structures, our financial arrangements, our glorification of globalisation, our treatment of asylum seekers and refugees: the 100 million displaced roaming the seas and land to find a place in the lands of the conquered and more significantly the conquerors.
US President Donald Trump promised to build several walls: today the White House itself has a steel fence.
Nothing will stop now the peoples’ migration: just as empires were built with guns and genocide on all the continents and so many islands: often with divine sanction in the name of civilising missions.
The modern world is created by migration: the new migration has disturbed the status quo. And COVID-19 has reshaped the world by its invisible presence and made us all deeply vulnerable: wave after wave until it becomes a tsunami, unless we combine the world’s resources to combat this with hope, innovation and collective determination. No-one is safe until all are safe. So far the signs are not promising: from Washington to New Delhi, London to Sao Paulo. Beijing and Moscow seem to be on another planet altogether.
The future is no longer like the pandemic of the past: our priorities and pride, our perceptions and prejudices, must undergo a seachange even as the world’s climate is changing catastrophically, invisibly every moment.
The Earth is not wearing any mask: look around from your backyard, across your street and see the setting sun or the rising moon and say if you’ve cared for the largest life-giving force: our one and only Mother Earth.
Gandhi and Churchill statues
I’m not much for statues. Ultimately they are good for pigeons, or perhaps a few monkeys, only.
But I’ve been involved in the erection of one statue: that of Mahatma Gandhi installed in Glebe Park in Canberra in the heart of the city. It was an initiative of a friend of mine--a devotee of the Mahatma: the statues are his gift to several cities.
He’s planning to send one to Fiji also: luckily he’s a rich accountant with more than an accountant’s accountability to a society that has given him a home and security.
So today, among several statues, we’ve two in Canberra that I’ve some interest in: Gandhi of course. But there’s another one : I’d not noticed it on the ANU campus where I had a cottage for three years. Across the road from where we lived, shrouded in the ghostly gum tress, is another statue: that of Winston Churchill. It stands there covered in leaves unlike the one in London protected by a steel fence. Because it was camouflaged, I hadn’t noticed it.
It was only when we were thinking of installing a Gandhi statue that someone pointed it out to me that there’s one of Winston Churchill. Gandhi and Churchill, were inveterate adversaries; Churchill saw that if Gandhi wins, the Empire will be dismantled. Hitler for him was an easier enemy; violence can be defeated with violence.
How do you fight someone who doesn’t see you as an enemy, but a friend.
Few national leaders were as friendly as Gandhi to the British Empire, trained as a lawyer in London, and where he discovered many treasures of his Indian heritage and cultivated enduring friendships in exile.
Churchill, of course, was the British hero who won the war, helped by Russian, American and Empire’s soldiers, more than a million from India alone.
Today Sir Wintston Churchill’s statues are under threat in England and elsewhere; Gandhi’s have been defaced by some rebels in Eastern India and in some African campuses; and the Indian Parliament now has installed a portrait of the man who conspired to assassinate the mahatma .
The ironies of history are manifold.
I remember being briefly a Fellow in Churchill College in Cambridge some years ago: as you approach the Dining Hall there’s a statue of Churchill right in the front: what strikes you is the shining feet where people must have touched them as they entered the hall for a meal.
Today, I think that the man who never fasted, and the one who fasted to save others, are two different qualities of heroes. Whose bust will survive COVID-19?
My bet is with the half-naked fakir; rather than the man with a big cigar-- all cigars, after all, end in ashes.
The half-naked understood the true meaning of nakedness in a world where we, the other half, overload ourselves in the Emperor’s new clothes, presumably ‘Made in China’.