When Willingdon statue gave way to Kamaraj’s

IT is often believed, erroneously though, that the Dravidian movement encouraged the concept of prolific placement of statues. And it is true. Anna and Karunanidhi permitted their statues on Mount Road during their tenure. But there was a precedent much before all this. Congressman K Kamaraj was the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu when a statue of his was placed on the island. The person invited to unveil the statue —- Nehru was horrified at first.

There was a statue of Lord Willingdon near the Gymkhana Club. Freeman -Thomas, 1st Marquess of Willingdon, though born in middle-class origins married into aristocracy and played tennis with King George V. These connections led him to high standings all across the British Empire.

While Governor of Madras and then Governor General of India, the Marquess had a weakness of wanting to be remembered for posterity and left a trail of places named after him. The Willingdon Island in Cochin and the Willingdon Airport (later Safdarjung) in Delhi were two of the many. Madras city chose to remember him with a club and a statue.

The Madras bronze was entrusted to MS Nagappa, by then swiftly emerging as a capable sculptor. Nagappa had done the statue of King George V, near the War Memorial with just a photograph of his majesty as a reference and got a personal hand-written reply from the king.

The statue depicted a standing Willingdon with one arm on his hip was placed on a baroque pedestal at the entrance to the Gymkhana Club in 1930. The adjoining bridge, across the Cooum, came to be known as Willingdon Bridge.

And it stayed there for 25 years till the centenary of the Sepoy Mutiny came up in 1957. Rightwing groups across India defaced colonial statues in a show of chauvinism and it was rumoured that there was a bomb conspiracy to shatter British statues in Madras, especially that of Willingdon.

In a preventive action which also tried to placate the heated templars of the rightwing, a day before the 10th anniversary of Indian independence in 1957, Kamaraj ordered the statue removed from the pedestal, placed in a PWD lorry and taken to Fort Museum. Some members of the Forward Bloc were reportedly arrested and sentenced to jail terms.

The pedestal stood empty for a few years giving ideas to the congressmen. The local Congress Party decided not to leave it unoccupied and to venerate Kamaraj with a bronze statue on Willingdon’s pedestal. But before the metal ingots could be bought and the sculptor was chosen, the Madras Corporation was captured by the opposition DMK. The DMK was, however, not averse to the ‘statue to the political foe’ idea perhaps thinking of the future harvests it would reap. The DMK now had an excuse ready if accused of sycophancy. “It was the political adversary which was installing the statue,” they said.

The 8-foot Kamaraj statue, by another Nagappa (son of the first one), was placed on Willingdon’s erstwhile podium. This too has one hand on the hip and looked eerily similar to its predecessor on the pedestal.

When C Subramaniam went to Delhi to convince the Prime Minister to unveil the statue, Nehru frankly told him that Kamaraj was putting him in a difficult position. But after some demur he accepted to make an exception to his policy of not unveiling statues of living persons. After opening the Parambikulam Dam and addressing to a lakh-strong rally in Madurai, Nehru travelled with Kamaraj in a special overnight train from Palani to Madras. The leaders alighted at Guindy station. Munuswamy, the DMK Mayor of Madras, was given the chance of receiving and garlanding Nehru to make things obvious.

Unveiling the statue Nehru said, “Memorials to living people were not always a pleasant sight.” But Nehru explained why he had departed from his policy. “Mr Kamaraj is a notable example of a real representative of the people, with extraordinary capacity, ability and devotion to his task.”

But then he also had a jab ready. The Prime Minister wished Kamaraj many more years of a fruitful life in spite of a statue being placed for him. It was a spectacle that excited great interest. Suddenly everyone of some social standing was imagining their own image on a pedestal in some important crossroad of town. And now when Indian roads are liberally dotted with statues of leaders of varying calibre, perhaps, it all started on the island on the Cooum River where unbelievably the simplest of them accepted to have a statue for him.