Why Ram Mohan Roy's statue will stand in Bristol
A few days back, in Bristol, England, a former master at Shimla’s Bishop Cotton School, Barry Williamson, handed me a packet. Among the many books, papers and magazines preserved for decades was a copy of the Observer dated April 16, 1967. The eminent journalist Cyril Dunn had written the cover story, ‘What’s Left of the British Raj’. At the time, India’s Independence from Great Britain was barely two decades old. Still looking for fragments of a vanished England in a fast-changing India, the magazine’s cover had a stereotype image of the statue of Queen Victoria that once stood outside the Town Hall in Old Delhi, with a cow in front of it. That statue was moved to the premises of the Delhi School of Art and replaced with one of Swami Shraddahanand.
Till he retired, Barry Williamson was a teacher of history. When he was teaching in India, he had fruitlessly advocated the introduction of aspects of Indian culture like music and dance in these Anglicised preserves. Back in Bristol, he continued his association with India and with the people and places that he and his wife grew to love. Much the same could be said of several others of their countrymen. Colonialism sucked the marrow out of India, but many ordinary people, teachers, engineers and doctors dedicated their lives to the well-being of our country. However unfashionable it may be, there is no harm in giving due where it is due.
Bristol, where we met along with some three dozen young boys from Bishop Cotton School and its teachers, seems to be a very honest city — at times, brutally and at times, amiably so. Here, honesty resembles a piece of dice. There are different faces but each belongs to the same cube. When thrown, one may show, but that does not mean that the others don’t exist.
On the first evening, like a shoal of curious fish, we came to a stop alongside a row of people squatting on the pavement by the harbour, with scribbled posters asking for money. With or without the posters, these were people whom we would call beggars in India. But, somehow, the word ‘beggar’ did not seem appropriate as these persons, with exemplary honesty, were asking for a pound to buy weed. The amount was specific, as was the intended purpose.
All around, the street art scene is remarkable and not surprisingly, some of the enigmatic artist Banksy’s works adorn the place. This again, like hip-hop music that questioned and brought changes in a ‘dyed-in-wool’ attitude, has made Bristol the heart of ‘alternative intellectualism’. In June 2020, the bronze statue of Edward Colston that prominently stood in a public park was pulled down by anti-racism protesters and thrown into the Bristol harbour; this was during the ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests. In the 17th century, Colston was a prominent member of the Royal African Company that during his tenure transported around 84,000 slaves, including some 12,000 children, to the Caribbean and America. While he made considerable philanthropic endowments in Britain, a statue marking donations made out of blood money is quite unacceptable today. Screws will always be put on our past. Generations ahead will interrogate what we have done in our time.
Apart from an impressive mausoleum, there is another statue in the heart of Bristol. This is of the Indian reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who died near Bristol in 1833, and is buried there. Calling for the removal of the statue of African empire-builder Cecil Rhodes, a campaign in Oxford calls itself ‘Rhodes Must Fall’. Taking a reverse cue from this and for the sake of a world that should have more bridges than barriers, this is why ‘Roy Still Stands’ and why ‘Roy Will Still Stand’.
Tagore was to write that Raja Ram Mohan Roy ‘…had the full inheritance of Indian wisdom. He was never a schoolboy of the West, and therefore had the dignity to be a friend of the West’. The biggest difference between those whose statues stand and fall is that while some had much to give, the others had eyes set on accumulating.
