The lives of monuments

Pasts Without Prejudice

What would be the most urgent lesson for Indian youngsters to learn from the complex and contradictory history of Indian monuments? That we must find ways of remembering a past in which monuments changed hands/functions/uses innumerable times, leaving historical traces over millennia. As a subcontinent, we are best poised to remember this layered past in creative, engaging and constructive ways. It will go a long way towards setting new standards in our public life and culture that we so sorely need.

No one who has seen a wonderful exhibition curated by Francesco Prosperetti some years ago at Rome’s most famous amphitheatre, the Colosseum, will deny how important such an education can be. As he put it, “This time, we wanted to tell the story of the Colosseum’s image, a powerful and very strong image…With this exhibition, we are trying to go through its life, because it is really a life that lasts two millennia, a monument that has changed functions many times.”

Who knew, for instance, that the great Roman ‘super bowl’ – for 350 years, home to blood sports and spectacles that took up some 400,000 lives of gladiators, slaves, entertainers, etc. – lapsed into complete rack and ruin, becoming a grazing ground for shepherds? They put the magnificent archways to uses that were life-giving, not life-taking. At least two noble families then fortified the place and treated the grand monument as their private home.

In the middle ages, it became a housing lot. Friars in charge of the Colosseum rented space for housing, stables, workshops, before the structure was seriously damaged by earthquakes in 1349 and vacated as a result. It even enjoyed a brief existence as a quarry.

Popular culture has associated the Colosseum with throwing Christians to the lions, although that story has been seriously doubted – some Christians were certainly killed, but was it because they were Christian, and was the violence intended as a lesson to other followers? Nevertheless, it is testimony to the power of that memory that the Colosseum was used for the Stations of the Cross, and a shrine – though unbuilt – was planned around the presumed ‘martyrdom’ of the Christians.

Only the late 19th century recognition of the archaeological importance of that site, and its multiple histories over two millennia, saved it from being turned into another Christian institution in Rome. No doubt, a growing tourist industry had its role to play in that turn of events, as millions of annual tourists to Rome bear out.

Karnataka, too, has many such instances of such ‘seriality’ given the structure of its religious past. The serial occupations may be a result of persuasion, conversion or conquest, but in all events, they were the result of temples/shrines being centres of not just material wealth but political power, as is well known to historians of ancient and medieval India (this continues up to the present day!). For instance, the conflicts between Jains and Shaivas beginning in the mid-12th century are immortalised in popular memory and literature, but also in stone. An important and well-known instance of the violent vanquishing of the Jains by Ekantha Ramaya is carved into the stone friezes and windows of the Someshwara temple at Abbalur in Haveri. The inscription celebrates the violent subjugation of the Jains.

Nor was such ‘annexation’ only of other religions that needed to be politically vanquished. Chikkadevaraja Wodeyar’s military triumphs in the late 17th century had culminated in the taking of an interesting trophy -- of Sweta Varahaswami – from Srimushna. In 1675, the copper plate grant recording Chikkadevaraja Wodeyar’s conquest to the east, west, and north of the Mysore region, ambiguously says, “the ancient image of Varaha at Srimushna, which had been removed during the Yavana invasion, he brought to Srirangapatna and set it up.” And that made its way to Mysore city in 1809 under Dewan Purnaiaya, installed in a “temple made of materials from a Hoysala building in Shimoga district.”

What do we do with this heritage? Should various aggrieved parties start claiming these circulating images, and spaces of worship, on the basis of remembered or documented (as my two examples have shown) “historical wounds”? Or should we use this very complex history to train our young to think differently – and urgently -- about co-existence, in our present times; to learn from history, rather than use it as a weapon for revenge or retribution? The ill-conceived involvement of the UP court in permitting investigation of the ‘roots’ of the Gyanvapi mosque in Mathura will surely result in hostility, bitterness, and injustice again, with nothing to be gained by true worshippers themselves. The job of curating the knowledge of our very complex heritage – and especially the multiple lives of Indian images and monuments -- for reconciliation and healing should be a priority for all citizens, rather than weaponising our heritage as an instrument of hate.