BENGALURU, India — Statues are powerful symbolic fixtures in Indian public spaces. Whether religious or commemorative, they are venerated. Idiosyncratic and whimsical, they vary from pious depictions of deities to beloved public figures, liberally distributed between street corners and traffic junctions, defining both the physical space and the context of public art.
India also holds the record for the world’s tallest statue. At 597 feet (182 meters), the “Statue of Unity” is installed in Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state. It depicts the solemn figure of the first deputy prime minister of post-Independence India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, and is nearly double the height of the Statue of Liberty. It epitomizes nationalist pride and identity politics; many such ambitious statue projects are in various stages of completion across the country.
A more recent statue stands at the Bengaluru International Airport, a colossal figure of the city’s founder, Kempe Gowda, greeting visitors. With a flowing robe and drawn sword, Gowda’s statue suggests a warrior ready to defend the city from its invaders.
In her book Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain posits that India’s statue obsession is “predicated on individual liberal subjecthood as well as collective affect and communal belonging; and it is […] often organized around a powerful or charismatic central figure.” Yet only scattered efforts have been made to map and document them.
In response to this lack, a triumvirate of city-based practitioners in Bengaluru — artist Ravikumar Kashi, urban researcher Salila Vanka, and architect Madhuri Rao — have begun documenting the city’s statues and sculptures for a project titled Narratives of Visual Culture & Spatial Politics: A study of public statues and sculptures in post-1990s Bangalore. Commissioned by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) for Project 560 (named after the city’s post code), with funding from the Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund, their findings were presented in an exhibition in the city this past May, On a Pedestal: A Study of Public Statuary in Bengaluru, at the Rangoli Metro Art Center.
Through counting statues and sculptures, the project ambitiously attempts to capture the city’s complex visual culture and investigates its constantly evolving psyche, inseparable from its identity-related power struggles, wrought by the ruling political apparatus at any given time. The project also seeks to explore the hand of both the state and civil society in shaping the city’s public spaces.
The city of Bengaluru grew exponentially in the 1980s, when the IT boom arrived at its doorsteps. Even as unfettered real estate development caused by a surge in migration flattened out its tree-rich landscape and lakes, pockets of local communities survived and the city’s public art, punctuated by statutes and sculptures, grew and thrived.
“There are so many ways to think about public art, but there is no documentation or a lot of academic engagement with this question of how this public art comes about and who the actors are,” Vanka, whose doctoral thesis examined the politics of public spaces, told Hyperallergic. “It is largely unregulated — while some of it is commissioned by public authorities, a lot of it comes up on its own, especially the subversive [art].” In the absence of regulations concerning urban aesthetics, the city of Bengaluru is peppered with haphazard installations.
One unintentionally subversive statue, located in a park in south Bengaluru, depicts a 20-foot-tall baby, eyes wide open, sitting cross-legged, milk bottle in hand, and sporting an unnerving smile. This statue represents the presence of a children’s park, but it wouldn’t be out of place on the set of a kitschy Hollywood horror flick.
Over 14 months, the team split their responsibilities and scoured the city’s neighborhoods, with help from crowdsourcing. Initially they thought they would record around 200 objects, but they ended up with 700 statues and sculptures.
Kashi, who has been documenting the visual culture of Bengaluru for decades and has published a bilingual book called Flexing Muscles that explores political street narratives of the city, emphasized how the city’s demographic shift is reflected in the statues. As the population grew, multicultural, nationalism tied to language fed into the public discourse as residents feared the loss of the local language, Kannada. These cultural anxieties are reflected in the profusion of statues of Kannada writers and film stars, celebrating their roles as icons.
The rise in nationalism also manifested in the ways some figures are portrayed, as in the case of the city’s founder. “Bangalore is not an old city, it’s only as old as the Americas,” Rao said. “We don’t have a pantheon of figures to eulogize, and [Kempe] Gowda was never seen as a soldier or waged any wars. He was just a chieftain of a small town and the earliest of his statues depict him as a very demure figure. But today he’s riding a horse and wielding a sword in his statues. It’s probably because he’s treated as an icon to exhibit Kannada identity and to gain political mileage.”
The heavily unregulated business of public art in Indian cities is often the outcome of community efforts. This is true in the case of film stars and statues of the author of the Indian constitution, B.R. Ambedkar. “Since Ambedkar is a Dalit icon, his statue is found in economically [oppressed] areas. These statues are typically made using concrete with barely recognizable iconographic details. In poor neighborhoods, the Ambedkar statue becomes a talisman of identity for people living in the areas” Kashi explained.
In some cases, public access to statues is limited because vandalism of a statute belonging to one community could spark widespread riots. Because these artworks are highly revered, any damage to them is considered to be sullying the reputation of the depicted figures and could result in communal unrest. The team also found that only a handful of the 700 statues recorded portray women. “It’s clear that the male gaze has penetrated the decision-making process of installation,” Kashi noted.
While documenting these statues and sculptures, the team may also have unearthed a parallel economy of sculptors. “The artists are almost invisible in this business,” Vanka said. “One of our goals was to ascertain the artists’ [identities], but there’s an abysmal lack of information.” Though the sculptors are established in the city’s niche field of public statuary, only their physical work towers over in the public imagination, overshadowing their reputations. They’ve uncovered two artists, Shivakumar and Venkatachalapathi, whose studios churn out up to 80% of the city’s statues.
For now, the documented statues reside on an Instagram page where the team also receives crowdsourced information on as-yet-undocumented ones from enthusiasts. While the question of funding to continue the project remains open, the team is now spearheading efforts to produce a report and an academic paper, and perhaps even a coffee table book or an interactive map.
Bengaluru’s public art is the palimpsest of the city’s ever-growing cultural anxieties. Using crowdsourcing, this project has democratized its documentation. “We needed to rectify the fact that the city’s visual culture is not being recorded,” Kashi said. “This project is a result of that effort.”
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