Iconoclasts and Iconophiles: Politics of Public Statues in Colonial India, 1880–1947

Iconophilia and iconoclasm have psycho-social parallels throughout history, despite the fact that each civilisation’s historical, sociopolitical and ideological settings have been different. British imperial presence, which peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of imperial ‘statue mania’, led to the employment of statue as an instrument for spatio-memorial hegemony in India. In reaction, the nationalist rhetoric included acts of violent and non-violent iconoclastic responses against the colonial statuary culture. But along with such reaction, reception as well as incorporation of statuary aesthetic culture was also present. This study claims that both iconophilic and iconoclastic psycho-social positions influenced imperial, loyalist and nationalist efforts towards establishing ideological supremacy.