Ram Sutar, who is fashioning the 395-foot Shivaji statue with his son Anil, is unfazed by concerns over the Rs 3600-crore bill the sculpture will run up If people had worried about how much the Taj Mahal would cost, it would never have been built, says Ram Sutar, the 92-year-old Noida-based artist who, by 2018, is going to give the world its highest statue, that of the 17th century Maratha warrior king Shivaji.
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About eight decades ago, acting on a whim, an 11-year-old Sutar had etched on a fragile slate a relief of Goddess Bhawani blessing Chhatrapati Shivaji. At the time he didn't know that it would fall to him and his son Anil (57) to fashion the Shivaji bronze, which will tower over the Arabian waters off Mumbai on reclaimed land about 3.5 kilometres out to sea.
In preparation for the monolith , Sutar has sculpted a sharp 50-ft model of Shivaji brandishing a sword astride a galloping horse, its front hooves frozen mid-air. It is one-seventh of the real McCoy we'd see off Mumbai's shore, a 395foot statue perched atop the equivalent of a 20-storey circular structure, which will elevate it to the touted 623 feet. The statue itself will be crafted at Sutar's workshop and pieced together in Mumbai.
But the fractional model, too, makes for an imposing sight at his atelier in Noida which in the neighbourhood is casually referred to as `Murityon Ki Factory'. A walk through it impresses upon the viewer the feel of a museum of historic greats, from Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel -deathless giants awing humans with their scale and unchanging frame.
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The father and son stand in front the 50-ft model, which took more than a year to culminate."The first step," says Anil of the process, "is to make a clay statue to freeze the design. Once you have the design, half the battle is won."
When the Sutars take the chisel to the block of metal, there isn't a ready image they are referencing: it is forged from memory. As such, the progression to the final design for the actual statue was punctuated by seven clay sculptures, showing Shivaji striking various poses.These prototypes were rejected for fear they might be "misinterpreted". More accurately, though, they were cast away to sanitise history to suit the volatile sentiments today. A model of Shivaji and his horse on top of the ruins of a fort and a broken canon was ruled out, for instance, as it could be seen as depicting Shivaji as a plunderer.
"It is a continual process. Just like a painter draws repeatedly to get the art right, we sculpt many times to enhance it," Anil says. It does not bother Sutar, who made a name for himself with his Gandhi statues -an iconic 20-feet bronze in a meditative posture adorns Parliament House -that the Mahatma and the Maharaj are on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. "Shivaji was a not a cruel person," his son Anil says, speaking for him. "He was not some Mongolian invader, he helped his people. Gandhi and Shivaji may be different personalities, but their ends were the same."
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Sutar has already sculpted three Shivaji statues, one of which also decks the Parliament House. "This time we wanted to depict him differently. We picked a more dynamic pose, with his horse frozen in a gallop and Shivaji sitting with a raised sword, signifying victory," he says.
Before the 395-foot-high statue is ensconced off the city, a ther mocol structure of the same scale will be created using 3D computer images. This in turn will be used to fabricate a fibre-glass sculpture, to be used as a cast for the bronze.
The challenge is procuring 1,700 tonnes of bronze for the statue -it will have to be imported.Sutar is conscious of the controversy over sourcing bronze from China for the 182-metre Sardar Patel Statue of Unity, being built in Gujarat, but he prefers not to comment, saying only: "I don't know yet where we will get it from."
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His Noida workshop and his foundry at Sahibabad together employ nearly 100 people. For the Shivaji sculpture, he will need to hire around 2,000 more. "Once they complete the foundation work in Mumbai, we will begin the process of casting here. The target is to complete the statue by the time the building is up," Anil says.
The Sutars are unfazed by concerns over cost: the project will run a bill of Rs 3,600 crore, an amount with which Maharashtra can set up a micro-irrigation programme to supply water to farmers in dry regions, or pay for rural roads seven times over, as a business daily pointed out; utilitarianism is not the artists' ideal."Had there been such alarm over budget, then the world would not have got the Statue of Liberty, the Mother Russia statue, or even the Taj Mahal," Sutar says. In any case, adds Anil conclusively, "Unless you have someone's monument, people tend to forget history. And a statue is the best way to preserve memory."