Rajagopalachari, the dissenter, may not have approved of his bust replacing Lutyens’

The installation of a bust of C Rajagopalachari within the precincts of Rashtrapati Bhavan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his February 22 Mann Ki Baat, is another step in his government’s drive towards what it has framed as decolonisation and restitution. The tribute to Rajagopalachari is befitting. He was a freedom fighter, an administrator, a statesman, and a principled dissenter from majoritarian currents. To honour him is to acknowledge the nation’s polyphonic heritage. Yet the symbolism of replacement — Rajaji’s bust displaced that of Edwin Lutyens, the architect who designed what was the Viceroy’s House in imperial India — opens an unsettling question: Does decolonisation of public spaces and memory have to be about erasure?

The decolonisation debate has gained urgency in recent times. The government has set a 10-year deadline to shed what PM Modi has termed “gulami ki mansikta” by 2035, the bicentenary of Macaulay’s 1835 education minute. From the National Education Policy (2020) to the unveiling of a new Parliament building, the ongoing effort is framed as a civilisational reassertion. But all too often, this endeavour is made to ride a politics of erasure — the renaming of avenues, the recasting of syllabi to exclude rather than include, the excision of inconvenient chapters — as if the recovery of voice and agency necessarily requires the displacement or diminishment of an Other from whom history and culture need to be constantly rescued. Added to this is the bogey of the fifth column, the “enemies within”. This zero-sum approach does not befit the country and it does disservice to its citizens. It narrows imaginative and intellectual horizons.

History’s burdens and inheritances are often intertwined and the path to decolonisation has to begin with an intellectual generosity. A mature republic can hold in the same frame both the courage of a statesman and the aesthetic bequest of a colonial architect, whose vision, however imperial its patronage, is an indelible part of India’s urban landscape. One wonders what Rajagopalachari would have made of this erasure. As he put it in a 1953 speech, “Truth should not be sacrificed at the altar of other objectives. It is to this I think you give the name of cultural freedom.” Only such capaciousness allows decolonisation to move beyond being a project of perpetual contestation to an acknowledgement of the past in all its diversity and complexity.