Rahul Rao, "The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire" (Pluto Press, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network podcast. I'm Stuthia Roy, and I will be your host for today. In this episode, we will be speaking to Dr. Rahul Rao about his upcoming book, The Psychic Lives of Statues, Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire, published by Pluto Press.

The book will be out this month on the 20th of March. Statues are monuments. The word monument gets its root from the Latin monere, to remind. So statues exist for the historical purpose of reminding a place in its people of their past and what helped create the world in which they live today. Except it's not that simple. The act of erecting statues is deliberate and discriminant. We choose who is worth remembering. It

It is a way for society to forge its own narrative about itself, a way to smoothen over the mess of history by creating a clean, albeit vague, past upon which we can look back with pride. The act of erecting statues is a self-mythologizing enterprise. In other words, it's inevitably dishonest. A statue of Winston Churchill, for instance, says nothing more than that he was important and must have done something worth remembering.

We do not glean any information from a statue other than the image, an individual metamorphosed into an ostensibly immortal icon.

Dr. Rahul Rao's book, The Psychic Lives of Statues Reckoning with the Rebel of Empire, explores the multifaceted and global meanings of the politics of decolonization in statues today. From Cape Town to Bristol to Richmond, the book examines how statues have become sites of resistance and contestation about imperial histories and post-colonial presence. The book takes readers across South Africa, England,

U.S. and India, even Australia and Scotland, showing how these controversies reflect deeper struggles over race, caste, and decolonization. He explores both the toppling of colonial statues and the raising of new ones, demonstrating that statues remain powerful vehicles for representation and cultural memory.

Through conversations with artists, scholars, and activists, the book offers a fresh perspective on how societies reinterpret their past and present through public iconography. The book asks, what makes this society of statues so sacred and paradoxically mortal? Dr. Rahul Rao is Reader in International Political Thought at the University of St. Andrews.

Before St. Andrews, he taught at SOAS for over a decade and served as a fellow at Oxford University. He completed his doctorate at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and his work explores the intersection of international relations, post-colonial theory, identity politics with a focus on gender, sexuality, race, and caste.

He has previously authored two books, Third World Protest, Between Home and the World, and Out of Time, the Queer Politics of Postcoloniality, both published by OUP. It was a real pleasure reading this book because in so many ways it feels prescient and like it was begging to be written, especially in light of 2020, Rhodesman's fall and such, and the flood of hot takes and opinions on the toppling of statues, that it's refreshing to read

a fleshed out, detailed perspective on how complex statues are. Dr. Rahul Ra, thank you for joining us here at the New Books Network. Thanks for having me, Siddiqui. And before we get into your book, could you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, your story, and how you got into writing this book? What sparked your interest in doing a deeper exploration into the politics of statues?

Sure. I grew up in India, in Bangalore, which is where I went to school and also university. I went to law school in Bangalore. And then I came to the UK in 2001 on a Rhodes Scholarship to do an MPhil and then a DPhil in international relations at Oxford.

I then taught briefly at Oxford for a long time at SOAS in London, and I'm now based at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. I started thinking about statues in 2015 when Roads Must Fall erupted as a movement in Cape Town, and then very quickly after that in Oxford. And of course, my own

as a Rhodes Scholar was what made me pay attention instantly. Anyone who has applied for or accepted a Rhodes Scholarship will have thought to some extent or perhaps deeply about the provenance of the money on which the scholarship is based.

the colonial provenance of that money, specifically the labor and the resources of Southern Africa and the ways in which those were exploited by Cecil Rhodes to create his immense fortune on the basis of which he established this scholarship, which was intended to bring students from all over the British Empire and the United States and Germany to Oxford.

to study there. So it's a scholarship with a very clearly imperial and colonial history. And when this movement erupted in 2015, one of its primary demands was for a statue of Cecil Rhodes that stood on the campus of the University of Cape Town to be brought down. Hence the name Rhodes Must Fall.

For the movement, this was a metaphor for a broader critique of what it saw as the enduring logics of coloniality and apartheid in the South African academy more than two years after the formal end of apartheid. So the movement was using the endurance of the statue to draw attention to

whiteness of the university in terms of its staff and student demographics, the whiteness of the curriculum, and of the symbolic environment in which post-apartheid South African students were studying and working. And so, of course, I paid attention immediately because this movement seemed to be

in a much more militant language than any of my contemporaries have articulated, drawing to the surface the contradictions

our professed beliefs in decolonization in a post-colonial world and the actual enduring coloniality of the structures through which we had acquired our own education, mobility, professional satisfaction, and what have you. And so it was those deep contradictions that the movement was bringing to light that Trotskyists

troubled me enough to want to write a book about statues. And when I started, I didn't think that this would become a much larger project about statues and statue controversies in many other places. I started by reacting quite episodically in the form of blog posts to these, what appeared to me at the time, to the isolated moments of statue protest.

And it's when this began happening again and again over the next few years, in response to different provocations in different sites, in places all over the globe, that I began to think that there was a larger story here about how and why statues become terrains for the assertion, but also the contestation of racial and caste supremacy. Thank you. And that makes perfect sense.

I didn't know that you were working on this before 2020, but that provides really interesting and important context. And we'll move into the contents of the book now. And in the first two chapters of the book, you lay the groundwork for us to understand the present day salience of the discourse surrounding statues. Why are people on all sides of the political spectrum in different international contexts fussed about statues?

And to situate this, you go into the intellectual theological roots of iconoclasm and like the impulse to topple. With this in mind, you talk about the paradox of what we are seeing today with a decolonial iconoclasm. You recognize that decolonization as a term has become vast and to some extent hollowed out, especially in the context of monuments.

How are you looking at decolonization here, and what does decolonial iconoclasm entail? Thank you. When I started writing the book, I felt like I needed to provide some kind of historical account of the practice of iconoclasm, of bringing down icons of smashing statues.

And I realized that very quickly that this was a huge and probably quite, that it was too big a task for any one book to undertake. And also that it was a story that many other historians, especially art historians, had already worked on quite extensively. But I was nonetheless interested in the question of historical comparison. Is what we're living through in the present unprecedented or

Or does it have some resemblance to moments of iconoclasm before, of which the world has seen many?

When I try to think of historical parallels, the most obvious episodes were those in which a regime had fallen and the statues or the built environment that that regime had put in place was brought down with it as a way to symbolize the fall of the regime. So we can see this, for example, in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. We can see it in

And most recently in Syria, with the fall of the Assad regime, statues of Assad and his father were attacked and brought down. We can see it in Iraq with the bringing down of statues of Saddam Hussein, although there are very interesting stories to be told there that have been told there about who actually brought those statues down.

Some of the most iconic topplings there were facilitated by the U.S. military as a way of telling a story about how the Iraqi people were grateful for the fall of Saddam Hussein. So in many of these instances, and one can go back to previous moments like the French Revolution as another moment of revolutionary upheaval that was followed by the removal of art that was connected to the Ancien Regime.

So there are many of these instances, but somehow the anti-racism iconoclasm of the present that I was interested in, Roads Must Fall, Black Lives Matter, seemed quite different because these movements were not toppling statues in celebration of a regime that had fallen.

Quite the opposite. They were protesting against the endurance of a regime of white supremacism that has not fallen. And their attacks on statues was sort of an opening, a salvo in a continuing struggle to bring that regime down. So these were iconoclasms of protest rather than celebrations of, you know, a mission that had been successfully accomplished.

In that sense, it seemed to me that there were some parallels with the Protestant Reformation and its iconoclasms, a protest against the power of a church, the tyranny, the corruption of a church. And so the second chapter tries to unpack some of these parallels between that instance of iconoclasm, different as it may have been in its geography and its politics, and

and the present. And it tries to do this through a kind of psychic reading of what spooks people about statues. What is it about statues that makes them seem like lively objects, that makes them seem to be, you know, a real presence that does political work in the present?

So that's some of the argument that I'm trying to get at. But to get back to your question about what a decolonial iconoclasm is, in my view, it's a form of iconoclasm that is not celebrating the demise of a regime, but is actually trying to bring that regime down, that is trying to decolonize, to alter the distribution of

power in society in some really significant and fundamental way. And you also talk about how like the older Christian iconoclasms are like fundamentally against any kind of like statue or icon to begin with. Whereas in this case, it's more that this is not what should be remembered. So it's not like you're against statues in principle. Yes, yes. So the Protestant iconoclasts were transgressors

trying to reiterate the central tenet of monotheism, which is that there is no God but the one true God and that any physical manifestations, idols that purported to represent that God threatened to take on a life of their own and become false gods. So they were against the statue form itself.

The decolonial iconoclasts of the present are not necessarily against the statue form itself. Although I think there are some people even in the present who think that statues are inherently problematic because they freeze ideas in time. They don't change. They can't change with the times just by virtue of what they are as objects.

And so they prevent societies from representing themselves in new ways as social mores shift. So there are people in the present who think that the statue form is problematic. But I think by and large, many of the decolonial iconoclasts that I'm writing and thinking and in conversation with

are objecting to the kinds of things that are memorialized rather than the fact of memorialization itself. Yes. And you say that this practice or this act of protest, it can be in its own way kind of paradoxical because you're drawing attention to something that is speaking to a larger issue, but ends up becoming about the statue itself. So, yeah.

It's like a double-edged situation. There is a kind of paradox to many of these statue protests because most of the time, the statue protesters are trying to use the statue to draw attention to some much more deeper, fundamental, more material injustice, some kind of institutional racism, whether it's the way the police operates, as in the Black Lives Matter protests,

or the institutional racism of universities, as in the case of Roads Must Fall, or healthcare, something that was very much alive in our minds during the COVID pandemic, which is also the time in which the Black Lives Matter protests unfolded.

These are all sites of institutional racism. They are sites of deep, continuing material injustice. The statues represent a connection between those material injustices in the present and historical processes in the past.

or historical processes that are considered to be in the past but are actually still with us. Colonialism, apartheid, the afterlives of slavery, right?

So the protesters are trying to draw a connection between the present and the past to show us that the past is not really past, that it still lives with us, and that we therefore need some kind of massive upheaval to root out that past, to pull it up by the roots and to build a new society on its ruins. And yet, there

There's a paradox because they have to keep reminding the wider publics that they're addressing that the protest is about much more than a statue. The statue is often the most eye-catching aspect of the protest, but it's meant to be a portal, a doorway into this much larger conversation. And so there's always a risk that if we get stuck talking about the statue, should it stand, should it fall, what else should come up here, who should design it,

there is a risk that we lose sight of those broader, deeper, more fundamental questions that all of these iconoclastic movements are really driven by. And yet they have to keep talking about the statue because that is what will grab the attention of the public in a way that conversations about structural injustice often struggle to.

So there's a tension between focusing on the statue as a way of attracting attention, but making sure that the attention doesn't just stay there on the statue, but is broadened into these other issues that I've just been talking about. Even where throats must fall, I mean, the stickiness of the legacy of the statue is so clear because people go into bureaucratic, legalistic language, and now all you have is a little plaque saying, oh, we

We all agreed that he's a bad guy, but we couldn't do anything about it because of whatever legal situation. So it's absolutely right that the difficulty of actually taking them down is testament to, in a way, how the past is still with us. And building on this...

You write about the ascriptive value given to statues that then produces iconoclasm, both historically and as we know it today, just as you just talked about. And on top of the kind of theological history of statues and symbols that you offer, you also talk about the way in which the aliveness of statues in our society also comes down to their corporeal architecture and phallic nature.

You write that, quote, as three-dimensional objects that occupy space in much the same way that bodies do, statues offer even more compelling proxies for bodies than paintings. Bodies that we might want to hurt or heal, revile or revere. This was in the context of defacing Balfour's

painting last year at Cambridge. Now you specifically look at how this culture of statue erecting, defacing and toppling is in some way erotic and what you call libidinal or more like how our encounter with statues is so. Could you elaborate on this and what it means for how we understand the call for toppling statues today? Sure.

I wrote a lot of the second chapter for the kind of reader who might be puzzled about how and why an inanimate object like the statue could actually affect people in a deep way. How is it that people can express pain and suffering in relation to the presence of a statue?

How is it that people can rally to defend a statue from attack or criticism as if it were a living thing that needed protection?

These are the kinds of social practices that I was trying to make sense of when I was writing this chapter and the book more generally. And one of the most compelling reasons I could think of for why we relate to statues as if they are living objects is in part because they are three-dimensional objects that occupy public space, very much like a human body would.

In that sense, they are more alive to us than two-dimensional objects or abstract, the abstractness of the word, right?

even though two-dimensional images and words are also very powerful and compelling and can move us to action. There's something about statues that takes us into an extra dimension. Dario Gamboni says something very interesting in a book about the destruction of art, about why

the suffragists attacked paintings in their struggle for the vote in the early 20th century. He says attacking a painting was the closest thing to bloodletting without actually hurting another human being. And this is why it attracted the attention of the public, both in positive and negative ways. And I think paintings can do that. And we still see this, right, in protests like Just Stop Oil or the Palestine Action protests that you mentioned a moment ago.

But if paintings can do this, statues do it even more because of their three-dimensionalness. But also, I think, because of their phallicness. Now, this is a common everyday observation. People often remark on statues as phallic objects. And I wanted to take that seriously, that sort of everyday insight or the everyday observation of the statue as phallic.

And I wanted to think that through a little bit more. It isn't just because of the shape of statues or the fact that they typically represent men, and they overwhelmingly do represent men in public space virtually all over the world. But I think there are some further qualities to the statue that makes it like a phallus.

There is something inherently non-consensual about statues. You know, even if they go through the whole process of, you know, municipal approval and authorization, of course, all of those things happen before somebody can erect a statue in a public space.

But as a viewer, you never give your permission for the statue to enter your sightline, right? In that sense, it's very different from other media of visual representation, like a book which you have to pick up or a film that you have to go to a cinema to watch or a painting that you have to cast your eye on the object before it has any impact on you.

Public art, commercial billboards, public statues, these are things that don't ask for permission. They are in public space. They create public space. And this is part of what accounts for their power, their ability to have an impact. You can't protect yourself from them. They're going to thrust themselves upon you, whether you want them to or not.

But this publicness and this exposure also makes them quite vulnerable. And so there's this weird combination of aggression and vulnerability that I think makes the statue a lightning rod for public discontent. It's brazen and it's in your face, but that also means that you as the spectator, and not all spectators choose to do this or want to do this, but you could theoretically walk up to the statue and

and challenge it in some way. And this is what protesters felt compelled and moved to do in these moments of decolonial iconoclasm. And it's interesting when people decide to pay attention to statues because you write about how often they just are around us and we ignore them until we don't or until someone tries to deface them and then it feels very personal or like rude. And

You also write later on in the book about how there wasn't a big impulse to topple statues in post-colonial India immediately after independence. And that came later on. What do you think explains this changing sort of attitude towards statues? It's not consistent. It sort of depends on the moment.

Yeah, that's a great question. So I read this very frequently cited essay by Robert Musil, who talks about how the statue is often unnoticed, the most unremarkable, unremarked on object.

public object. And I sort of draw on that essay, and I have this line in the book where I say something like, most people in most places ignore most statues most of the time, which is a weird thing to say in a book about statues. But what I'm trying to get at there is to say that these are relatively unremarkable objects until they become, until they're attacked,

the moment in which a statue is defaced is also the moment in which it comes alive, in which its importance, its symbolism, its performativity as a political object becomes most visible when somebody makes the connection between what the statue is supposed to represent and some contemporary ongoing injustice that people are upset about. And so what the defacement does is it makes that connection between

present and past, between the time that the statue is situated in, the person it represents, the events it represents, or perhaps also the time in which it was built, between that time and the time in which we are looking at it.

So there is something about defacement, I think, that brings statues alive. This doesn't happen everywhere and at all times because it relies on that action that connects the past and present. So it is the case that colonial statues in many places have sort of just been there without people making very much of them. And

India is a good example. There was a period just after independence or just around the time of independence when colonial statues in North India were quite controversial.

But it was a brief period. And by and large, the Indian government at the center and in the States also dealt with this by dumping these statues in the equivalent of what we would today call statue graveyards. So in Delhi, this is Coronation Park. In

West Bengal, this is Bharatpur. The statues are still on public display, but they're sort of out of mind for the most part. Or they take on this much more benign and slightly neglected quality. They're just not as important as they were before. And I think the reason for that, especially in the Indian case, is because the political fault lines had already shifted. The real antagonisms in the body politic were...

were no longer between the British and Indians as a unified whole, but were amongst Indian groups themselves, along lines of religion, along lines of caste. And actually, you could argue that this had happened well before the British actually left

that it began in the early years of the 20th century with the advent of elections on a very limited franchise to provincial assemblies, the growing rivalry between the Congress and the Muslim League and Ambedkar.

These were the fault lines that everybody could see were becoming much more salient. And so in those contexts, the colonial statues don't arouse as much ire or as much antagonism as other kinds of symbols. Now, that's not true in other places. In settler colonial contexts, where the colonizer intended to stay and not just stay but eliminate the natives,

the colonial statues remain much more resonant, much more powerful symbols of the antagonisms of those places. So I think we really have to pay attention to political antagonism as a way of making sense of which statues attract attention and which ones just, you know, persist in public space without anyone really bothering about them. Mm-hmm.

Thank you so much for that. And it links in with the third chapter, which is an exploration of Gandhi and Gandhi statues. And this chapter works to understand just how many angles and complexities that the anti-Gandhi sentiment brings out, all of which funnel themselves through the calls for toppling various statues from South Africa, Africa,

to the U.S. and India. You write that attitudes towards Gandhi do not map neatly onto power. There are both anti-racist, anti-castist, feminist critiques against him, as well as the Hindu rights animosity towards him. For the listeners who may not know, what are the politics behind Gandhi's statues, and what is so unique and complex about this case that made you want to explore it at this level of depth?

Thank you. So the protests against Gandhi statues, which have been going on for a while now in many places, on the surface appear relatively peculiar if we situate them alongside other kinds of protests against colonialism, slavery, apartheid, because Gandhi is supposed to be an icon of anti-colonialism. He is an icon of anti-colonialism. Whatever one thinks of his politics, that was his life's work.

And so to see attacks on Gandhi statues unfold at the same time as other anti-colonial, anti-racist attacks was, I think, really interesting and something I wanted to explore more. I could not have predicted how complicated this exploration would become because I did not, when I started, realize the vast amount

extent of these attacks on Gandhi statues, which have happened in North America, in the US and Canada, in various parts of Europe, in different parts of Africa. I talk about South Africa, Ghana and Malawi, in Australia, and of course in India, although the Indian attacks on Gandhi are, I think, slightly different.

or perhaps even more complicated. So this is what I try to get into in the chapter on Gandhi. It's really a global chapter. It's not a chapter that's just about India. And it's using Gandhi and attitudes towards Gandhi to map how a kind of global conversation around race and caste and gender has shifted over the last decade.

couple of decades, say. And so what I try to do is to unpack the different sources of animosity against Gandhi and the different kinds of social forces that underlie those different antagonisms. So first, there is an anti-racist critique of Gandhi that focuses particularly on his attitudes towards race and his attitudes towards Black South Africans during the time he spent there.

A lot of this critique is coming out of places like South Africa, from the kind of revisionist history that people like Ashwin Desai and Ghulam Waheed have produced.

on Gandhi in his South Africa years. There is an anti-caste critique of Gandhi that comes very powerfully, obviously from Ambedkar, but is continued and kept up by the Dalit movement, which has acquired a much more global prominence

over the last two decades, one could say, or two and a half decades, certainly since the Durban Conference against Racism in 2001. There is an increasing critique of Gandhi's gender politics. This is not new. I think feminists have always been troubled by some of his views on gender, as well as some of the lived practices around gender. There are...

Very, I think, important conversations about his attitudes towards his wife, Kaslubab, women in the ashram, his experiments, so-called experiments in celibacy, the practice of sleeping naked alongside women in his entourage. All of this, I think, has come under the spotlight again today.

perhaps much more so in an age, in a Me Too age, when we are thinking about the actions of powerful men and the ways in which gender becomes implicated in how they wield power over people, including their followers. There's, of course, a long tradition of, a long line of stories of gurus and the sexualization of the power of the guru. And I think there's something of that as well in Gandhi.

And then there is, of course, the Hindu right attack on Gandhi, which happened in his lifetime and is really the force behind his assassination by Nathuram Godse.

And this is quite a different critique, right? It's a critique from the right that accuses Gandhi of emasculating Hindus and India, of losing, quote unquote, losing Pakistan and of making the body politic weak through his practice of ahimsa and nonviolence and celibacy and so forth.

So that is an entirely different critique of Gandhi that continues to manifest itself in the form of protests and attacks and celebrations of his death on the anniversary of his assassination. So I put all of these attacks against Gandhi alongside each other, not with a view to positing any kind of equivalence. I'm interested in how incommensurable they are.

but nonetheless thinking through how they might attack Gandhi in very different ways, including visual representations of Gandhi in the present moment.

Thank you. And it really is very, very multilayered. And it links in with the fourth chapter, where you look into not the politics of toppling statues, but the politics of erecting statues, and how in many ways it occurs out of the very same impulse that toppling them comes from. With the case of the Statue of Unity,

of Falabhai Patel, which took place on the heels of the Norma da Bachal Andolan movement, erecting the statue becomes just as much about the politics of that moment and less about the figure himself.

And kind of like the Statue of Liberty, the statue has become a tourist attraction in and of itself, however problematically. I was at the Indian Embassy recently, and the travel ads heavily feature the Statue of Unity in a very crude way that I guess is supposed to be appealing. But could you tell the listeners a bit about what is going on here and the significance of this tallest statue in the world? Sure.

Sure. Thank you. It's really interesting to hear about your visit to the embassy and the way in which the statue is being sort of mobilized as a symbol of the new India. So I was interested in new statues and in building statues because I think it's very easy for us who are situated in the West to assume that.

looking at all of these instances of statue toppling, that the era of the statue is somehow over. You know, in the Western metropolis, we tend to see statues as a thing that sort of

you know, a medium of representation that was very popular in the Victorian period, whose time has now passed. And yet, if you look at contemporary India, that could not be more wrong, because statues are being built at this frenetic pace on an ever more monumental scale by different communities as a way of claiming space and asserting pride in identities of caste, religion, etc.,

And I think the politics of this is very different depending on who is doing the building, who is asserting pride, who is claiming space. So I think when the Dalit community does this through building statues of Ambedkar, that is a very different thing from when the Hindu right

does it by building statues of its icons. And I try to make a distinction in the chapter and really throughout the book between building statues as a way of claiming a foothold in a public sphere from which one has been excluded and building statues as a way of asserting a kind of stranglehold over that public sphere as a way of preventing anybody else from getting in. And I insist that we should not view these things as in any way equivalent.

But coming to the Statue of Unity, which is a statue of Sardar Balabhai Patel, for listeners who may not know who he is, he was the first Home Minister of India. And he's remembered and worked very closely with Nehru and Gandhi. He was like Gandhi or Gujarati and a very close associate of Gandhi for all of his life.

But he's remembered, I think, above all for his role in persuading the hundreds of so-called princely states, which were technically independent.

but had treaty relations with the British crown, persuading those states to join the new Indian Union. A very difficult task because there were hundreds of these states of very different sizes and power, and they all had particular interests that had to be accommodated or sort of challenged

into this project of building the new nation. He's sometimes called the Bismarck of India, which might make sense to West European readers, a kind of state builder, um,

And the reason that the BJP, which obviously has been in power in India at the centre since 2014, is so interested in Patel is because he's seen as a figure who embodied the kind of muscular nationalism that they believe was missing in people like Nehru and Gandhi. Although Patel was in the Congress for all of his life,

The BJP now has a tendency to try and appropriate what it sees as the right wing of the independence era generation.

And Patel is one of those people whom they're trying to appropriate. It helps that he comes from Gujarat, which is also the home state of Narendra Modi, who styles himself as a latter-day successor, I guess you could say, of Sardar Patel. So the statue is built in Gujarat, and it's built at the site of the Narmada Dam, which is one of the largest and most controversial hydroelectric projects in India, perhaps in the world.

In the chapter, I briefly narrate how significant the struggle over that dam was. It was a controversial project because of the sheer scale of displacement of people, especially Adivasis, indigenous people who lived in the Narmada River Valley. And it...

came to a head in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the Supreme Court ruled that the construction of the dam could go ahead despite this enormous scale of displacement in the greater national interest. Arundhati Roy wrote a very famous essay, Critical of the Dam, called The Greater Common Good, which tells this story very well.

Now, the reason that all of this is significant is because the pro-dam movement was one of the first laboratories for a kind of

Gujarati nationalism that provided the blueprint for Modi that he was able to pick up in his chief ministership of the state of Gujarat when his power was challenged in the aftermath of the Godra train burning and the pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat that unfolded after that. So when that happened, he...

he reproduced this sort of Gujarati nationalism and chauvinism and has continued to do this ever since on ever greater scales, including at the national level. So in a way, the struggle over the Narmada Dam was a kind of formatted moment for a style of authoritarian populist politics that

that has now been scaled up to the level of the national. So I call it the ground zero of authoritarianism in Indian politics today. And so you have this statue that is built at the site of this dam. And I think the fact that the dam has that significance...

also transfers onto the statue itself. And I see the dam as a kind of triumphant capstone on this much longer running project of extractive, what I call settler colonial capitalism that has been unfolding in the Narmada Valley over the past many decades. So that's how I see the significance of the statue. Of course, the statue builders don't want us to remember all of that.

They want us to see the statue as the symbol of the nation and not just the symbol of the nation, but a nation that has become a rising power. Hence the frequent comparisons to how this is double the size of the Statue of Liberty, which is, you know, a kind of ours is bigger than yours kind of claim, a way of asserting increasing power and prominence on a global stage.

And it's also meant to be a fun tourist attraction. And I'm really interested in this chapter in the way in which authoritarianism cultivates a sense of fun and enjoyment as a way of making itself popular. This is how it becomes populist.

And so I try and pay attention to how this site has been created as a site of pleasure, as a site of tourism, leisure, you know, maza, as we would say in Hindi, as a way of making authoritarian populism something that is enormously popular in India today. Thank you. And, and,

How does this almost competitive politics of erecting statues interact with and respond to the toppling of statues elsewhere? You've already kind of answered this, but as you explore here, what psychological work do these statues do for the communities? Yeah.

I think the best explanation that I've come across is in W.E.B. Du Bois' notion of the psychological wage of whiteness. So Du Bois, listeners will know the great African-American sociologist Du

theorizes that one of the ways in which class revolution is made difficult in the United States is by a sort of peeling away of a white working class, away from a possible alliance with the black working class, and

a suturing of this white working class to white elites, not necessarily by giving them a better material deal in the form of better wages or, you know, a better social compact, but by dispersing what he calls the public and psychological wage of whiteness.

through various non-material sops or benefits. We can give many examples of this, the whole Jinkru regime, segregation, but also I think the building of these statues honoring confederate heroes in the U.S. South 50 and 100 years after the Civil War becomes part of the wages of whiteness. And so I draw a parallel between that and the kind of culture war that the Hindu right is fighting in India today.

again very heavily through symbols that try and attach subordinate caste groups to Hindu upper caste groups by reminding them of their common animity vis-a-vis Muslims.

And I argue that the building of statues is part of this psychological wage that gives people a sense of pleasure and ownership and fun and mastery that might allow them to feel included within the dominant ruling dispensation, even though very little about them materialize, changes or improves. And so I think that's part of what's going on in this spree of statue building, which

And this psychological impact is also perfectly linking in with your idea of decolonial fascism and the way in which decolonial discourses, theories are opportunistically used and mobilized for really right-wing nationalist projects. And this is happening all over the world, but clearly in the case of India, it's not

And it's also kind of a little bit internally contradictory. But what are you referring to when you talk about deco? I mean, it's not a little bit contradictory. It's like...

Quite a paradox, right? Yeah, it's an amic. So what do you mean by decolonial fascism? I've been really intrigued and puzzled, like many people today, about the ways in which decolonization is used to justify all sorts of things that would seem quite far away from what one might have thought it was about. So in

in the realm of statue building and particularly Hindu right statue building and the ways in which the Hindu right is transforming the built environment and the symbolic environment we're seeing decolonization invoked increasingly by ideologues of the Hindu right to justify a range of things that they're doing

And I came across this in the context of statues when, you know, in the midst of this National Vista project where the centre of New Delhi is being massively renovated at the height of the COVID pandemic and continues to be, statue Subhash Chandra Bose goes up.

near India Gate and BJP MP Rakesh Sinha writes an article justifying this and invoking figures like Frantz Fanon and Ngoogie Watiyongo, icons of the decolonial canon, in justification of this project. And that's really disturbing and quite odd to me because

This is the Hindu right pretending that its symbolic changes are directed against the remnants of British imperialism when we know that the audience in which they're really directed are Indian Muslims. And this is because for the BJP and the Hindu right more broadly, decolonization is necessary not only vis-a-vis the British Raj, but also allegedly the Mughals. And further,

a direct line is drawn between the Mughals who are seen as a colonizing force and Indian Muslims who are seen as some contemporary representation or remnant of that Mughal or Muslim invader presence. So they are really using decolonization discourse not to attack the real power centers in the world, but as a weapon with which to attack relatively defenseless minorities

who are then scapegoated for a range of problems that ail the body politic. So this is what I'm calling a decolonial fascism, the perversion of what decolonization was supposed to be about and the turning of it against the very groups and communities that it should protect and whose interests it should really champion and defend. And it's using the kind of cultural purchase that the term decolonize has created

globally and of course in India as you said the anti-British sentiment that just exists

And finally, the book enters into the debate about statues in a very unique way, and is a bit distinct from debates regarding cultural memory, erasure, and artifacts, museums, reparations. It's slightly distinct from that, and showing that statues themselves function differently, as we've talked about. They have an aliveness that is

So finally, I want to ask you, and it's going to sound a little bit glib, but do you think statues will ever die? No, I don't. I think anyone who's paying attention to the fact that we are still building statues everywhere, I think is testament to the...

The realization that they are powerful forms of memorialization. Why do people build statues? Because they claim space. They assert pride. They are a call for dignity. They can assert pride in both ways, the pride of the dominant, the pride of the subordinate, the subaltern.

And in that sense, the building of a statue can be colonial. It can be decolonial depending on the power relations that surround it. But I think beyond statues and beyond sort of figurative statues that embody, you

you know, particular humans, we are continuing to see very interesting forms of memorialization around the enslaved, the disappeared, victims of the Holocaust, these large-scale mass atrocities in which the bodies are

are not visible. And what I mean by that is that the scale of the atrocity is so large that the commemoration of individual bodies becomes almost impossible, almost inconceivable. And I'm really conscious that we're having this conversation in the midst of against the backdrop of the genocide in Gaza, where I think we have once again been brought face to face with this

the scale of atrocity that is, you know, it feels almost wrong to talk about memorialization in a context where something is ongoing, where it can be prevented, where further death and suffering can be prevented. And really, I think that's where all of our energy should go. But I am conscious that in these moments of large-scale loss, we are also thinking about how not to forget, how never to forget.

what has just happened. And there the question of memorialisation will become important, even if it is not the most pressing concern right now in the midst of what's going on. And the extent to which like,

libraries, anything that could help remember is erased. Absolutely. And I think that allots us to the power of memorialization. The fact that those archives and records have been destroyed allots

alerts us to the power of those repositories of information, the power of those forms of remembering, which we must not allow to be effaced and destroyed in the ways that the powers that we might be trying to. Mm-hmm.

Thank you so much for this conversation and for joining us here at the New Books Network, Dr. Rao. Thanks for having me. And for the listeners, if you're interested in the contemporary global politics of statues, be sure to pick up a copy of The Psychic Lives of Statues by Rahul Rao.