Mahatma Gandhi statue finally installed in Tallinn
A statue of the trailblazer for Indian independence Mahatma Gandhi has been unveiled in the Mustamäe district of Tallinn.
The statue had been held in storage for some years awaiting an appropriate time for installation, "Aktuaalne kaamera" reported.
Estonia was several years ago gifted the statue of Gandhi by the state of India. Having long awaited a ceremonial unveiling, however, the statue was now put up, with virtually no fanfare at all.
In the meantime, the statue, by Indian artist Ram Sutar and cast in bronze, had been kept in storage, awaiting a suitable moment to be installed and unveiled.
Kristi Karelsohn, director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs's Asia department, shed more light on what had happened.
"The Gandhi statue was gifted to Estonia by India, and in fact this offer was made at the end of 2019 in connection with the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's birth. The statue itself arrived in Estonia a couple of years later," he told "Aktuaalne kaamera."
"It had actually been left waiting for a suitable time, when India's foreign minister or some other high-ranking statesman or official might visit Estonia," Karelsohn went on.
India in fact frequently gifts Gandhi statues, Karelsohn added. A similar monument has been on display in a park in Helsinki, for instance, since 2020. In Estonia, however, the bronze statue by remained in storage for several years.
The purpose of the pedestal, in a pine grove on the edge of Mustamäe, a leafy neighborhood west of central Tallinn, was not clear to many passers-by.
In spring, it seemed the real purpose of the plinth was clear, when an installation by artist Reigo Nahksepp was sited there.
India's foreign minister S. Jaishankar had been scheduled to visit Estonia this autumn, but this trip was canceled, and so the decision was made to wait no longer and to go ahead and unveil the statue.
Tallinn city artist Elin Kard said that this was not the first time a "backlog" of gifted statues and the like had happened in Tallinn; the city has not established a procedure for choosing artworks for public space, she noted.
As for the Gandhi statue itself, Kard felt that the edifice did not fit the pedestal's dimensions.
"Looking at the size of this statue and the size of its base, these certainly are not in harmony. This very conservative monument base calls for a much larger statue. At the same time, this shackled little sculpture here, probably shackled temporarily, gives an effect of being something other than who he is. I won't start giving examples here, but more like some fairy-tale character. In this context, it may even be amusing to look at, but at the same time it's not amusing at all, since we are dealing with a permanent artwork in the city of Tallinn," Kard said.
Born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1869, the honorific Mahātmā (meaning venerable in Sanskrit) was first applied when Gandhi was living in South Africa and working as a lawyer and civil rights activist, around the time of World War One. He later returned to his home country and became the leading figure in the struggle for independence from Great Britain, which he famously visited in 1931. He opposed the partition of India on religious lines, which nonetheless went ahead, leading to the formation of the states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. He was assassinated on January 30, 1948, just months after Indian independence became a reality.
--
Editor: Andrew Whyte, Johanna Alvin
Source: 'Aktuaalne kaamera,' reporter Hanneli Rudi.
