Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the statues installed by the founder of Telugu Desam Party N T Rama Rao in Hyderabad, this paper engages with how memory and past is configured in the present, for the contemporary politics, through monuments and particularly statues.

Paper long abstract:

Statuary has been one of the significant means of remembering the past and the persons from history in the present. Statue involves a complex layering of history of the past times and the biographical image of the respective person represented. Here two discourses of representation intersect - visual and political, thus turning statue into a complex 'text'. This paper engages with one monumental project conceived and executed by N T Rama Rao (NTR) on Tank Bund of Hussain Sagar Lake in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. N T Rama Rao was a Telugu star-hero turned politician, established the regional political party named Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in 1983 and became Chief Minister in 1984. NTR invoked the notion of 'Telugu Pride' and 'self respect', and emerged as a self proclaimed saviour of Telugu people. Through these symbolic frames NTR had imagined to consolidate a unified and utopian Telugu identity. As a part of such an effort he executed a megalomaniac project of installing statues of thirty three 'Telugu Luminaries' on the Tank Bund in the capital city Hyderabad. These personalities belonged to different times, identities and sub-regions correlating to different trajectories of history. This paper attempts to understand how past gets reconstructed through a regionalist political ideology, the image of NTR and how it interacts with the space through statues.