The Hindu Business Line : Presiding over Latbagan

On Monday morning, the people of Kolkata were greeted by a picture showing a makeshift, ugly-looking contraption lifting a statue of Dr B. C. Roy, the erstwhile Chief Minister of West Bengal, literally by the scruff of his neck, as part of a relocation programme following the decision to build an underground car-park in front of Writers' Buildings. It is a pity that statues cannot speak, for if they could they would probably have registered a Singur-like protest against being evicted from their home. Perhaps, they would even have sought compensation, which would not have been surprising in times like these when protests are being staged all over the country by people who do not like the idea of being shifted, even for the cause of `development'.

Mute Observers

But, of course, statues do not speak and are, from their perches, just mute observers of the inexorable passage of time, watching but not recording the gradual process of how progress affects human society. So they are helpless when humans play around with them, move them about and, in some cases (as in Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union) put an end to their existence by breaking them up. As they say, before one's Creator one is nothing and everything; statues are no exceptions.

For people old enough to remember and recall, the photograph of the shifting of the B. C. Roy statue must have brought back memories of other such displacements over the past decades in Kolkata (then Calcutta — more the Second City of the British Empire than Mother Teresa's backyard of the poor and impoverished which it became in later years). And there have been many of them which, if nothing else, tells us something about the exalted position the city held as far as statuary and monuments are concerned among the old metropolises of the country.

On the Move

One remembers the time when one could not pass the Chowringhee Road- Park Street crossing without being drawn to the striking equestrian monument to General Sir James Outram standing unprotected (since 1874) in the middle of the grassy plot to the west of which flowed Outram Road towards Red Road. In the late 1950s, this statue made way for an equally touching representation of Mahatma Gandhi around which a tall circular iron fencing was put up — the symbolic significance of which became clearer to the majority of Indians with the passage of time.

In the 1980s, it was the Mahatma's turn to move (to the corner of Mayo Road and Red Road, where he still stands) when construction of the city's metro railway began. Today, but not quite on the same spot, there stands a comparatively diminutive representation of Jawaharlal Nehru which, unfairly, gives the impression of being an afterthought when placed against its predecessors.

At the close of the 19th Century and till the 1960s, Red Road (now renamed) was a veritable gallery of imperial statuary, both hated and loved by the populace depending on the perspective one chose with which to view History.

Some of these works in stone and metal, among others, are safely ensconced today in the grounds of Latbagan (Government House) in Barrackpore, lovingly looked after by the present Governor of West Bengal, Mr Gopalkrishna Gandhi, who has even produced a short monograph on them.

Ranabir Ray Choudhury