They trooped in on a rainy afternoon, a motley group of Indians, mostly Bengalis, tripping on slushy garden paths to the heart of Bloomsbury. The occasion on Thursday was the unveiling by Prince Charles of a bust of Rabindranath Tagore to mark the poet-philosopher’s 150th birth anniversary. Out in Gordon Square, tour groups gawped at the homes where Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell and others of the Bloomsbury set once lived; but decked in their fine saris and kurtas, members of UK’s Tagore Centre were concentrating hard on their welcome speech, Rabindrasangeet and swaying dance moves in the Santiniketan style. The prince came minus his spouse (which took the shine off for the press a bit), gave a handsome tribute peppered with quotes from Tagore and the girls danced on the sodden grass. Then HRH strode off, no doubt to a welcome cup of Darjeeling, leaving everyone to gaze lovingly at the bronze by British sculptor Shenda Amery.
It isn’t easy to be permanently installed in a London square. Gordon Square belongs to London University, where Tagore was a student, and where he forgot the manuscript of Gitanjali in the underground. (It was thankfully located in the Baker St Lost & Found some days later.) The university gladly gave permission for a commemorative sculpture.
Tagore could soon have an Indian companion in Gordon Square. London-based Indian author and journalist Shrabani Basu has set up a trust to campaign for a bust of the British-Indian heroine of World War II, Noor Inayat Khan. Basu, who published Spy Princess, the bestselling biography of Noor in 2006, revived the saga of a daring 30-year-old, born of an Indian Sufi and American mother, enlisted by Churchill’s special espionage outfit to enter occupied France as a radio operator and mobilise resistance fighters. She performed her dangerous duty with exemplary courage but was hunted down by the Gestapo in Paris, taken to the concentration camp at Dachau and faced a firing squad. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross (the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross) and the Croix de Guerre. Then history turned its page.
A film of the book is in the works but Basu feels that Noor, who lived in Gordon Square, deserves an enduring memorial. “No Indian woman has a statue in London. Noor deserves it because she laid down her life for Britain.” Basu’s committee has collected a quarter of the 100,000 pounds required for the statue through charity appeals.
Gordon Square’s Bloomsbury twin next door is Tavistock Square, another centrepiece of literary London. Virginia Woolf lived here and so did Charles Dickens. But towering in the garden is a large bronze of a seated Gandhi on a pedestal by the sculptor Fredda Brilliant installed in 1968. (Nehru’s handsome bust on a lotus pedestal, temporarily beheaded by Sri Lankan Tamil protesters in 2009, is located near India House in Aldwych.) Tavistock Square also has a memorial to victims of the terrorist bombings that ripped London in 2005 and a flowering cherry to commemorate Hiroshima.
It’s the season for installing statues in London’s squares. A few days before Tagore’s bust went up, a 10-foot high bronze of former US president Ronald Reagan went up outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. The US embassy itself is due to move to new premises across the Thames in Battersea for security reasons next year and Westminster Council appeared none too keen to have Reagan adorn Mayfair. It cited the norm that memorial sculptures can only be erected a decade after a person’s death but gave permission after pressure from the Ronald Reagan Foundation in California which paid for the bronze. It’s three feet taller than Reagan’s statue in Capitol Hill in Washington. This has immediately prompted the demand in some quarters that there should be a statue to the man who ended, in Reagan’s phrase, the “evil empire”. Mikhail Gorbachev is very much around but London likes the idea of idolising him — when the time comes.
