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Thoughts on statues, a thread. Many public statues in colonial India commemorated acts of state violence. Among these, especially prominent were statues of ‘mutiny heroes’, including men responsible for ordering sadistic and summary executions. 1/7
Such prominent reminders in Indian public spaces of the capacity of state power were intended to overwhelm compliance in its subjects, although by the early twentieth century, these symbols merely served to provoke them. 2/7
The writer Yashpal wrote feelingly of the daily humiliation involved in walking past a statue of John Lawrence outside the High Court in Lahore. For many years, the script on whose plinth rhetorically demanded of passers-by: ‘Will you be governed by the pen or the sword?’ 3/7
After many complaints, the text on the plinth of the statue (erected in 1902) was later changed to the slightly more conciliatory 'I ruled you by the pen, and not the sword'. The statue was removed after independence, in 1951. 4/7
A prominent statue of General Neill in Madras became the focus of a Gandhian protest in 1927, and its removal was one of the first acts of the provincial Congress government in 1937. 5/7
At the time, the House of Commons objected that the removal of the statue of Brigadier General Neill, whose 'extravagantly severe' reprisals in north India are well known, was 'offensive to all Europeans in India'. 6/7
Such statues served as deliberate reminders of the colonial state's capacity for violence; of what it had done before, and might do again, if provoked. 7/7
