Desecration and the politics of ‘image pollution’: Ambedkar statues and the ‘sculptural encounter’ in India

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the culture of statue-desecration in contemporary India. The focus is the desecration of Ambedkar statues. The first section argues that the installation of Ambedkar statues is a process of sacralising, reconfiguring public histories and modernities, while instituting a new iconicity. In section two, the essay moves on to examining the ‘profane aesthetics’ of desecration. This includes studying the emergence of a ‘counter-spectacle’ in the political culture jamming of desecration, the creation of a culture of image pollution and the making of an affrontier.

KEYWORDS:

• B.R. Ambedkar
• statues
• desecration
• public modernity
• profane aesthetics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ambedkar-statues-damaged-in-up/article23402859.ece; https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/varanasi/ambedkar-statue-damaged/articleshow/63826083.cms. Accessed 8 November 2018.

2. Appadurai and Breckenridge in ‘Public Modernity in India’ (1995) view India’s modernity through the lens of public culture. They propose that public culture and its modernity encompass arenas that have emerged to articulate the space between domestic life and the projects of the nation-state. It is contestatory, as national culture seeks to co-opt local and folk culture and different cultural registers battle for visibility. This zone of contestation, they argue, is at the heart of public modernity in India.

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Pramod K Nayar

Pramod K Nayar’s latest books include Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture, Human Rights and Literature: Writing Rights, Brand Postcolonial: ‘Third World’ Texts and the Global, among others. His essays have appeared, most recently, in the Routledge Handbook of Celebrity Studies, the Blackwell Companion to Celebrity, and in journals such as a/b: auto/biography studies, Biography, Narrative, Image and Text, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and others.