The murder of a black man named George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, U.S., on May 25, 2020, has compelled the world to revisit a large swathe of its past, stretching over half a millennium. An examination of how public memory has recollected this past over centuries has led the world to discover how unbearably weighted and dishonest this recall has been and to seek its swift replacement with a more honest recollection.

It was as if the world was waiting for just such a cue to rise in fury against the long history of enslavement and the murder of millions of not just black people but people from indigenous communities, tribes and oppressed castes. As the #BlackLivesMatter protestors defied the pandemic and lockdown to rise in rage across the world, they found a target in the statues of slave owners, traders and colonial despots. While there have been earlier protests against statues of infamous historical figures in public squares, universities and government campuses, the move to remove them took on an urgency this year that seemed to eerily echo the disturbed times.

Sensing the public mood, several institutions took proactive action. Princeton School of Public and International Affairs no longer bears former President Woodrow Wilson’s name after the university’s trustees concluded he was a racist and did not deserve the honour. Yale University recently renamed one of its undergraduate colleges after a distinguished alumnus, Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, replacing John Calhoun, an unrepentant slave-owning white supremacist. In Antwerp, Belgium, a statue of King Leopold II, who brutalised Congo in the late 19th century, was removed from a public square.

Temples of worship

Protesters pulling down a statue of Confederate General Albert Pike in Washington, D.C., in June.   | Photo Credit: AFP

Statues of powerful people are seldom just about art. They are calculated to evoke awe, gratitude, and genuflection to power. In a paper on British symbols of authority, Paul M. McGarr of the University of Nottingham says that around 170 statues were brought into India from England to “make the capital a new temple of empire, the quintessential statement of what British imperial rule had meant and continued to mean for Britain and for India”.

India, however, has always been fairly relaxed about the whole business of colonial statuary. Despite sporadic moves to change street and city names, there has never been a nationally coordinated move to dismantle statues from the Raj era. While a few ‘beheadings’ have taken place in the past — the statues of Lord Cornwallis and Arthur Wellesley in Mumbai lost their heads in 1965 — others, like those of Queen Victoria and Edward VII in Bengaluru or Queen Victoria outside Victoria Memorial in Kolkata — stand where they have always stood. In fact, some are even being carefully restored by the state.

The case can be made that such symbols of past oppressors must stay on the ground, that history is not about erasing our past but contextualising and interpreting it. It is also, as many thinkers have pointed out, never a good idea to view the past through the eyes of the present. Famous British historian Mary Beard noted: “Too much of this debate has traded on a view of history that divides it into goodies and baddies. It has surveyed the past, and given it a good ticking off, according to our own present values.”

Others disagree. African-British writer Annie Olaloku-Teriba, writing in a recent issue of the art journal Frieze, states that the toppling of the merchant and slave owner Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol “has reignited a debate about which (or whose) histories public art should commemorate”.

She approves the single-mindedness with which disparate people, with no central coordination, are forcing the erasure of the rogues of history from public memory. “The real debate,” Olaloku-Teriba writes, “is about where power lies. It is about who gets to decide what we are confronted with in public space and, more importantly, what kind of society we are.”

Gandhi under fire

Sadly, popular ire has now claimed what could be its most undeserved victim — Mahatma Gandhi. His statues have been vandalised in Johannesburg, Washington and London, the last two as part of the ongoing #BlackLivesMatter campaign. There is a demand that the one in Leicester be removed, while in Ghana, a statue presented to the University of Ghana in Accra has been taken off its plinth and stashed away.

The last is a mystery. Ghana University’s decision to keep a statue of Gandhi, presented by the President of India, on its premises was consciously taken. As its then Vice-Chancellor, Professor Ernest Aryeetey, recollected, a consensus had been reached within the university community that Gandhi‘s early racist ideas had given way to a recognition of the equality of all races, and that placing his statue in the university premises was perfectly in order.

While some African thinkers have initiated fresh critiques of Gandhi and his role as a possible proto-racist or colonial collaborator during his early days in South Africa, the writings of Marxist historian Perry Anderson and writer Arundhati Roy, who have selectively interpreted his life and work to cast him as relentlessly racist and casteist despite the existence of evidence to the contrary, have also contributed to this. It has coalesced now into the demand to remove his statues along with those of people whose racism has never been in doubt.

It is true that Gandhi made derogatory references to black people while in South Africa. He protested being imprisoned alongside Africans (employing the racist term ‘kaffirs’ prevalent at the time) and wrote a letter to authorities demanding a separate cell. However, the fact that his views changed, not after he left South Africa but while he was still there, a full seven years before he returned to India, must be acknowledged, as indeed Joseph Lelyveld has in his sensitive yet controversial biography of Gandhi, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India (2011).

He writes that Gandhi, speaking at the YMCA in Johannesburg in 1908, “makes it plain that he is speaking of Africans as well as Indians when he states, ‘We can hardly think of South Africa without Africans’, and that ‘they are able-bodied and intelligent’, ‘entitled to justice’ and what he calls ‘a fair field’; thus “implicitly acknowledging for the first time that Indians and Africans came into the colonial labour market as equals”. There is enough material in Gandhi’s writings and speeches to show how he evolved from his early positions to learn and grow as a non-racist thinker as well as to record his deep appreciation for the black cause in the U.S.

In his essay, ‘Gandhi’s West and the West’s Gandhi’, Professor Vinay Lal of UCLA talks of Gandhi’s sustained engagements with black leaders from the U.S. over the years. In fact, there is no doubt that Gandhi inspired black people in America. Lal points out that Howard Thurman led the first African-American delegation to India in 1936 to meet and converse with Gandhi. This was followed by the visits of Benjamin E. Mays of Morehouse College the same year and of Mordecai Johnson, President of Howard College, in 1947.

A statue of Christopher Columbus that was beheaded in Connecticut in the first week of July.   | Photo Credit: AFP

These men were, according to Lal, among many other prominent African-American clergymen, educators and public figures who succeeded in placing before the public a narrative of the freedom struggle in India; and who followed Gandhi’s Satyagraha campaigns, fasts, calls for mass mobilisation, and jail terms with unstinting interest.

The Ambedkar connect

In the same essay, Lal also writes of how, in response to repeated requests from the famous black intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois, to contribute to his journal Crisis, Gandhi sent across a “little love message” for African Americans: “Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grand-children of slaves. There is no dishonour in being slaves. There is dishonour in being slave-owners.”

In today’s context, Gandhi is best understood through his relationship with Ambedkar. Their acrimonious interactions masked extremely productive outcomes, none more so than the Poona Pact of 1932. At that time, and even later, Ambedkar saw the Poona Pact as a successful blackmail manoeuvre by Gandhi. The Pact’s positive impact, however, became obvious only when the Indian constitution — Ambedkar was Chairman of the Drafting Committee — was adopted, giving India’s historically marginalised and discriminated-against sections a huge political voice.

Today, 84 seats in the Lok Sabha are reserved for the Scheduled Castes and 47 for the Scheduled Tribes. That an affirmative action programme, which in range and magnitude is unsurpassed in the world, matched such political empowerment makes the Poona Pact a foundational document for the empowerment of the underprivileged and a model of its kind.

Fortunately, a realisation is dawning in some circles of how important Gandhi and Ambedkar together were for India, and how relevant their joint contributions were for the making of this country. One of the early voices to recognise and reflect upon this was Riyas Komu, a leading artist and thinker, whose artworks reflect the joint contributions of Ambedkar and Gandhi towards the upliftment of India’s poor and marginalised.

‘Dhamma Swaraj’, an artwork by Riyas Komu.   | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

“These works,” says Komu, “may also be conceived of as conversations with history, a return to a possible exchange of words between Gandhi and Ambedkar in a journey in search of a Dhamma Swaraj. It’s also a reminder of social action by marginalised communities against atrocities of various kinds.“

One of Komu’s signal achievements is to have introduced Ambedkar to a South Africa that only knew of Gandhi. Two statues of Ambedkar, gifted by Komu, stand in the open ground of the Nirox Foundation near Johannesburg, bringing to the attention of Africans that the India story had more than just Gandhi to it and that there were individuals who matched and even surpassed some of his achievements. This effort from Komu represents a small start to unravelling, as much for India as for the rest of the world, the full magic of a country that debates, discusses and accepts transformational societal changes with dramatic, albeit raucous, panache.

As the #BlackLivesMatter movement gathers momentum, its followers — spread across the world now — would do well to pause and take a relook at Gandhi while discovering Ambedkar. In so doing, they will be pleasantly surprised to find that the former was no racist and the latter was a remarkable personality they could lean on for inspiration.

After his near-death at the hands of a movement he would have enthusiastically backed, Gandhi needs a resurrection now just as much as Ambedkar deserves to be better known outside of India.

The writer teaches at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.