When the bust of Edwin Lutyens was removed from Rashtrapati Bhavan, the moment passed without spectacle. There was no crowd, no ceremony of dismantling, no theatrical repudiation of the empire. And yet, for those attuned to the language of art and power, the gesture resonated loudly. It was a reminder that rulers rarely shout when they can rearrange the room instead.
Throughout history, those who govern have understood something that artists know instinctively: images endure longer than decrees. Statues, murals, architecture, and ceremonial spaces shape memory not through argument but through repetition. You walk past them daily; you absorb their authority unconsciously. Over time, they become part of the natural order of things. This is precisely why power invests so heavily in them.
Lutyens’ presence inside Rashtrapati Bhavan was never neutral. The palace itself, originally the Viceroy’s House, was conceived as an architectural performance of empire: scale as supremacy, symmetry as inevitability, stone as permanence. To honour its architect within its walls was to quietly reaffirm the logic of imperial order, even decades after independence. The bust was not simply about Lutyens the artist, but about which histories were permitted to occupy the inner sanctum of the state.
Its replacement with C. Rajagopalachari alters that internal grammar. Rajagopalachari does not represent aesthetic innovation; he represents political transition, an Indian inheriting a colonial structure and briefly inhabiting it before history moved on. The substitution is not about art versus politics; it is about the politics of art. It reframes the building from a monument to imperial confidence into a site of negotiated sovereignty.
This is how culture operates in the hands of the ruler, not through destruction, but through curation. Empires rarely fall by being erased; they fade by being recontextualised. Statues are not toppled so much as demoted.
Public sculpture has always functioned as a technology of power. From Roman emperors casting themselves as gods to Renaissance princes commissioning equestrian statues, the visual arts have offered rulers a way to stabilise authority across time. The body of the ruler, rendered in stone or bronze, promises continuity beyond mortality. Even in modern democracies, the impulse remains. The difference lies only in who is deemed worthy of being monumentalised.
In post-colonial societies, this question becomes particularly charged. What does one do with inherited forms that were designed to dominate? Architecture and sculpture pose a unique dilemma: they cannot be footnoted. Unlike texts, they do not explain themselves. They simply stand, asserting their presence. To leave them untouched is to tacitly accept their authority; to remove them is to risk accusations of amnesia.
India’s current moment reflects a broader global reckoning with this tension. From debates around colonial statues in Britain to the dismantling of monuments across Africa and the Americas, societies are revisiting not history itself, but its staging. What is being challenged is not the fact of the past, but the honours bestowed upon it in the present.
Yet it would be a mistake to read such acts as purely reactionary. They are also creative gestures. When a state intervenes in its visual culture, it is composing a new narrative, deciding which figures anchor its moral universe. This is not unlike the patronage systems of old, where rulers shaped artistic canons through commissions and exclusions. Power has always edited culture; it is merely more visible when it does so retrospectively.
The unease many feel stems from an implicit truth: art feels purer when it appears autonomous. But public art has never been free. It is funded, placed, maintained, and framed by authority. Its meanings are negotiated over time, and occasionally reclaimed. To pretend otherwise is to misunderstand its function.
The removal of Lutyens’ bust does not diminish his architectural legacy. New Delhi remains inconceivable without him. What it does diminish is the assumption that artistic brilliance alone guarantees eternal veneration, especially when that brilliance serves an unequal order.
Ultimately, the episode invites a larger reflection. Statues do not merely commemorate; they instruct. They tell us who deserves to be looked up to, quite literally. When a ruler reshapes that field of vision, they are not rewriting history; they are declaring which histories will no longer command the centre of the room.
And perhaps that is the quiet power of such gestures. Not to obliterate the past, but to remind us that culture is never finished, memory is never neutral, and the stone figures we inherit are always subject to the living hands that choose where they stand.