So, when a statue does strike me as being, well, striking, I’m not only delighted, but also stand for minutes on end to admire such wonderful anomalies in stone. As I did recently when I was staying in the Fort area of Mumbai and chanced upon a figure reading a book on top of a cupola held up by a two-storeyed, many-pillared, intricately carved structure.
Even in the busy gol chakkar of P D’Mello Road and Mint Road, with his pedestal crisscrossed by lawless electric lines and tres anar-chic pigeons trying their damndest best to make him look up from his book, the figure – on closer inspection, a boy – is unperturbed, utterly immersed. His right hand holds the book as if it’s a Kindle. His left hand to his side is balled up in a fist as if reacting to a particularly riveting, or even disturbing, passage.
Over a fortnight, I passed this arresting figure every day, standing in stone above the boisterous crowds, a boy having no care for the world fudging its way below him. Soon enough, I learnt that the structure is Muljee Jetha Fountain, and the statue on top is of Dharamsee Muljee, son of Ruttonsee Muljee, a cotton merchant.
Young Dharamsee had died at the age of 15 in 1889 and his father, commemorating his son’s love for reading, commissioned the fountain. Designed by Frederick William Stevens, also designer of the nearby Victoria Terminus a.k.a. Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, it was unveiled in 1894.
But it is the statue, sculpted by John Griffiths, head of Bombay School of Art (later Sir JJ School of Art), that holds your gaze standing as it does above the Mumbai din and raat. This is a rare case where a statue in an Indian city tells a story without us knowing the story as national or cultural myth. Most importantly, the statue is beautiful – poignant, strangely haughty, otherworldly, even as it inspires. Thankfully, unlike most other old, historic roadside statues and structures, especially those not depicting dead politicians and other historical figures, Muljee Jetha Fountain was wonderfully restored in 2017 by conservation architect Vikas Dilawari with funds gathered by Kala Ghoda Association. Back in the other city I’m familiar with, in a reply last week to an RTI enquiry, Kolkata Municipal Corporation informed that between 2013 and 2024, some 189 statues and busts were installed here. A breakdown of the identity of statues reported is revealing, and tiresome: 24 Swami Vivekanandas, 22 Rabindranath Tagores, 21 Subhas Boses, 15 Ma Sharadas, 8 Mother Teresas, 7 Nazrul Islams, 6 Mohandas Gandhis and Khudiram Boses…
This is hardly an exhaustive or representative list. Ramakrishna statues and busts are almost as prolific on Kolkata’s streets as the number of Mamata’s photos appearing in Kolkata newspapers and of Modi’s in those of other cities. And the twin 35-ft statues of Gandhi and Subhas Bose – recognisable only by his Lennon glasses and ‘Congress’ cap – erected in 2019 near my parents’ home in Beleghata are white, limewashed, Godzilla-class monstrosities.
Chandril Bhattacharya, one of the sharpest social commentators of our times, got it bang on when he recently observed in the context of sense of humour among Bengalis, ‘Just erect another statue and you’ve done your bit. You don’t have to read him, know him, understand him, or even remember him. Just turn him into a statue.’
Our statue-culture is almost psycho-sexual. Check the pair of ‘Football Legs’ that stop till the torso outside Kolkata’s Salt Lake Stadium and you’ll know what I mean. Which is why it doesn’t matter how any statue or bust in a public space looks. Unlike Fort’s poignant figure of Dharamsee Muljee, grotesques erected in the name of worthies is all that counts.