8.5ft Vidyasagar to watch over college vandalism spot

KOLKATA: A full-scale statue of Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar will stand guard over the very courtyard in the college where the original bust of the 19th Century Bengal icon was vandalised less than a month ago.
The towering 8.5ft pristine white fibre-glass statue will be set against the facade of Vidyasagar College that has been freshly painted in a soothing cream and blue shade.Sculptor Gautam Pal oversaw the installation of the statue on Monday evening, ahead of the unveiling on Tuesday. A bust of Vidyasagar will also be unveiled at Hare School and then transported to the college. The bust will replace the one that was vandalised during BJP leader Amit Shah’s roadshow on May 14, five days before the final phase of Lok Sabha polls in Bengal. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who will unveil the bust at Hare School, had upped the ante against BJP following the vandalism, pointing to the party’s alien origins for its ignorance about Bengal’s culture.
The education department had initially commissioned the bust to artist Niranjan Pradhan. But the latter backed out as the time given for sculpting the statue was too short. “I was supposed to do the Vidyasgar bust but there wasn’t enough time to create the icon’s bust. They’ve spoken to me about two other busts: one of Raja Rammohan Roy and the other of Sir Asutosh Mookerjee. But they are yet to be finalised,” Pradhan said.
Pal, though, didn’t have any problem in meeting the challenging deadline of less than three weeks. A full scale plaster of Paris statue of Vidyasagar that he has in his ancestral residence in Krishnagore came in handy for creating a mould for the fibre glass statue to be unveiled in the Vidyasagar College courtyard on Tuesday.
“I have made Vidyasagar statues for Haldia Development Authority, Haldibari Municipality and Burdwan Municipality. So making another was no issue. My team in Krishnagore created the mould and then we did the fibre glass statue in five days,” the artist recounted.
Incidentally, it was Pal who had sculpted the statue of Bharatiya Jan Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee when the marble bust in a park next to Keoratala crematorium was damaged in March 2018. That vandalism had been a reaction against the pulling down of statues of communist leader Lenin in Tripura after BJP came to power.
“I am an artist who creates. Any destruction pains me, particularly works of art. Statues are works of art. Over the years, I have seen statues of Vladimir Lenin and Saddam Hussein being pulled down. I think removing them to a place that is less conspicuous is a better idea than destroying them,” the artist said, whose most painful experience was seeing footage of the two 6th monumental statues of Buddha carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan valley in the Hazarajat region of central Afghanistan being blasted by Taliban.
The state government is all set to make the unveiling of Vidyasagar’s bust at Hare School a mega-event with Bengal’s literati as well as Vidyasagar’s family members and bicentennial committee members invited to the function. “The entire state had protested against destruction and hooliganism. We had promised to reinstall the statute which was destroyed and we are doing so in less than a month,” said education minister Partha Chatterjee.