After independence in 1947 and the turn towards a secular India, Coronation Park became a monument graveyard. Colonial era statues across the city were dumped at the North Delhi park, where they remain to this day. Now, the park is actively used for recreation by residents of North Delhi while the monuments, many of which have been defaced, graffitied, and damaged remain on plinths scattered throughout the green space. Despite a number of planned (but never executed) preservation attempts and minor interventions, the park endures as a site of uneven and ambivalent governance, wrestling with memories of colonialism and modes of commemoration.
With the rise of Hindu nationalism in Indian politics and public life under the Narenda Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, symbolic sites and monuments are being actively questioned and re-evaluated. The BJP's further politicization of contested memory sites across the country and its attempt to define India and its history as distinctly Hindu raises questions for sites of colonial memory, namely Coronation Park (Subramaniam 2019). For this research, I explore how nationalist discourse surrounding sites of memory is reshaping and inflecting ongoing preservation efforts at Coronation Park. How is discourse of key stakeholders-the central government (Delhi Development Authority), local politicians, and preservationists (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) transforming in this new political context?
Following work in London by Jacobs (1996) around imperial heritage and preservation discourse, Kavuri-Bauer's (2011) work on Mughal architecture in India, as well as more recent scholarship by Walton (2019) and Jovanović (2019) concerning the reappropriation of heritage sites, I investigate the shifting contours of political discourse concerning this ambivalent site of colonial commemoration, in turn, shedding light on its unstable and volatile meaning for Indian history and identity. This work raises important questions about the layering of local and national memory, and the fractured nature of memory politics which continue to play out and transform in postcolonial India.
Works Cited:
Jacobs, J. M. (1996) Edge of Empire. First edition. London: Routledge
Jovanović, M. (2019) 'Whitewashed empire: Historical narrative and place marketing in Vienna', History and Anthropology. 30 (4), 460–476
Kavuri-Bauer, S. (2011) Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India's Mughal Architecture. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Subramaniam, B. (2019) 'Return of the Native: Nation, Nature, and Postcolonial Environmentalism', in Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism. Seattle: University of Washington Press. pp. 113–144.
Walton, J. F. (2019) 'Introduction: Textured historicity and the ambivalence of imperial legacies', History and Anthropology. 30 (4), 353–365.
