Shelley’s Ozymandias speaks of the pointlessness of kings using stones and granite to try and immortalise themselves. But statues and large structures have been a key to conveying a sense of power for centuries. And statues have had particular significance in India. If they didn’t, why would the most prestigious space in the capital, under the canopy near India Gate, straight down the road from Rashtrapati Bhavan be still empty — because a decision still can’t be taken, after 62 years of independence, on who should be made to stand there? But talk about statues over the past few months has been mostly of the huge stupa-like structures and four-dimensional Ashoka’s

Lions-type constructions of the UP chief minister. They’ve attracted much condemnation — do they seek to deify the living? — but the UP CM is not a first at all. Kings, monarchs, even democracies have always looked at statue placements as important markers of themselves, as a claim on the memory of future generations.

The last of the (political) statue conversations of any significance (pre-Mayawati) was in the mid-’80s when N.T. Rama Rao, wresting power away from the Congress in Andhra, went on to transform the tank bund by the Husain Sagar lake in Hyderabad with an array of statues, of literary and political greats — reminiscent of a time when poetry, cinema, literature and public life and politics were woven together seamlessly — especially in south India, with its intimate links between politics and popular arts.

Now, a far more significant statue conversation is taking place amongst the southern states, which had stopped midway about 18 years ago. Tamil Nadu and Karnataka exchanged statues of literary giants: Tamil’s Thiruvalluvar and Kannada’s Sarvajna. Thiruvalluvar’s statue had been ready for the past 18 years, but was never unveiled; the author of the timeless work Thirukkural could but stand, covered, in a crowded Bangalore square till August 9. And Pramodini Deshpande completed Sarvajna’s in Chennai in only eight months, but decades after the then-mayor of Chennai, M.K. Stalin, gave his consent for its installation.

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