Hello! I’m feeling super upbeat. Who can whine, when even the men, women and children who were mass murdered at Jallianwala Bagh are leaping out from the redesigned memorial walls with delighted smiles, as if they’ve just heard about the whole “GDP grew at 20 per cent” thing. They look as if some ‘New India’ factotum has instructed them to not be so negative. If victims of colonial homicide can smile, what’s your excuse?
What historian Kim Wagner has called the ‘Disneyfication’ of the Jallianwala Bagh memorial is part and parcel of the vision of ‘New India’. You could describe that vision as ‘brutalist bling’, where brutalist (with a small ‘b’) is not so much about exposed concrete as about a bull in a china shop. It likes neat and shiny and, when possible, very big. It is meant to be “positive”, even if that means blinging up a crime scene, as in Jallianwala Bagh. Some of it is meant to convey monolithic, impregnable power stamped across what used to be public space, as in the Central Vista redesign. Some of it is intended to domesticate rival legacies by turning them into a sort of theme park, as in the proposed Sabarmati Ashram redesign.
‘Brutalist bling’ is not merely an architectural term, however – Architecture is only one of the ways that power imposes a psychological state. A self-styled emperor always wants to overpower, divide, and rule with an iron fist, throwing in a dollop of circus to help the people remember that they adore him.
When you bring to politics a compulsion to enforce Hindutva-style order and purity upon a chaotic, many-splendoured country, it’s expressed in a kind of clumsy grandness, a militaristic style and vision recast as modernity -- a sort of tantrum that says “Love me, or else”. If ‘New India’s instincts are ugly, or insensitive, or destructive, or wasteful, or needless, or inappropriately timed, or intimidating, or all of the above -- come outside and say that again, you anti-national!
What’s the point of being an all-powerful leader if one can’t rename a stadium after oneself, or tear down historical buildings, or build a samosa-shaped Parliament building? You want to leave your impression on future generations, you know? Maybe they should consider minting coins with his likeness on them. That insufferable Mahatma got to have his face on currency, so why not the founding emperor of Hindutva?
It must be annoying that the dastardly Mughals were so successful at taking over that it’s just easiest to steal their moves.
Democracy is a slow, tumultuous thing made of over-many opinions. More preferable is a manipulative imperial project disguised as the will of the people. Never have so many people been hoodwinked into believing that the wreckage they see around them is actually a neat and shiny upgrade in which they should take pride -- and that, furthermore, they’re Hindu-phobic if they don’t.
Empire establishes itself by replacing the past. And if this can only be accomplished by putting the gory back in glory, whether in architecture or society, well, what’s an emperor to do?
Anyway, the wonderful thing about life is that everything passes, which allows you a bit of anticipatory schadenfreude. One day, someone will come along and either bulldoze these yucky buildings, or restore them to what they once were, or -- my preferred outcome -- put up a plaque alongside to explain the historical context: “This unpleasant structure was erected in the 2020s by an autocrat who helmed the socially-divisive political movement called Hindutva. The location, size and design of the structure suggests self-aggrandisement founded on a crisis of confidence. It remains standing as a ringing caution to Indian society: Never again.”
That really does make me smile.
(Mitali Saran thinks a good asteroid could solve all our problems)