CHENNAI : Walking past the calls of fruit sellers in markets tucked behind statues and pastel posters, bursting through slang, or lingering in revamped buildings, memories are intangible inhabitants of the city. These recollections roam through sprawling settlements, witnessing metropolises pieced together through time. Mutating over decades, they travel through written records, oral histories, juicy rumours, or fade from residents’ minds.
In an attempt to pin down memories and mark time, we rely on statues, portraits, busts, and sculptures. A walk around Chennai reveals human efforts to document prominent figures, that society seems to deem worthy of remembering; look no further than names of buildings and localities, peeling posters pasted on walls of politicians over time, and golden statues of CN Annadurai, MGR, or M Karunanidhi. “Madras has had a rich history of women.
The women in Madras voted in 1921, ahead of 90% of the world. Very few states in the US and UK allowed women to vote at that point,” explains historian Venkatesh Ramakrishnan. Yet women or workers who built this city — with bricks, blood, and words — vanish from traces of textbooks, statues, and buildings.
A friend once remarked: if we were ever invaded by an extraterrestrial race and they had to document our existence through the cityscape statues, they would think our world was inhabited mostly by men. Apart from rage-filled Kannagi, poet Avvaiyar, and activist Annie Besant statues on the sandy.