Just like that, statues seem to be back in the news.
In Mumbai, the area known as Kala Ghoda got its horse back on Tuesday. This was the statue of King Edward VII on a horse which was removed in the mid-1960s and banished to—like all wild life in captivity—the Byculla zoo or the Jijamata Udyan.
A report in the The Times of India says it was then replaced by an equestrian statue of the Maratha king Shivaji, which later “galloped off" to the Gateway of India.
The Shivaji statue will “compete" with another one, of Sardar Vallabhai Patel in Gujarat, in height. Mint reported that Patel’s “Statue of Unity" will be 182m tall, while the Shivaji memorial in Mumbai will be about 190m. But including the base, the height of the Patel memorial will be 20m more.
Both will attempt to be the tallest in the world in a classic mine-is-bigger-than-yours scenario.
As is usually the case, you win some, you lose some. So Pune lost a bust early this year—of playwright Ram Ganesh Gadkari, because the group that removed it claimed the writer had insulted Sambhaji, Shivaji’s son, in a play he wrote over a century ago.
Andrew Unsworth wrote in the Sunday Times that we fail to see people in the past in the social milieu they lived in. He takes the example of Robert Wagner, the Western Classical musician who is as admired for his music as reviled for being an anti-Semite. But Wagner’s beliefs were the norm in 19th century Europe, so should a statue of Wagner in Germany be taken down today?
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