Every society tells stories about itself. Some are whispered in family homes, others are argued over in academic journals, but few are as visible, immovable, and state-sanctioned as the ones told through monuments. They rise out of the ground in iron and stone, bearing likenesses of heroes, symbols of pride, and declarations of permanence. They claim to represent memory, but they often serve as instruments of forgetting. Monuments, particularly those erected or sponsored by the state, do not merely reflect history. They rewrite it. They do not commemorate the past as it was, but as it ought to be remembered. In this sense, monuments are not static artefacts. They are ideological texts, crafted, positioned, and scaled to manipulate affect and construct a selective version of national identity.
In this context, it is not surprising that regimes across the political spectrum have turned to monumental architecture to assert power. The larger the monument, the more significant the assertion. India’s Statue of Unity, standing at 182 metres and celebrated as the world’s tallest statue, is not merely a tribute to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. It is a political intervention. Built in Gujarat, commissioned by a right-wing nationalist government, and unveiled amidst grand displays of patriotism, the statue participates in a symbolic economy. It monumentalises a historical figure who can be ideologically moulded to fit contemporary aspirations. Patel, once a congressman and a staunch secularist, is subtly rebranded as a Hindu nationalist icon. The monument does not explicitly state this, but its context, its funding, and its surrounding rhetoric make the message clear. The statue is not an objective honouring of history. It is a tool of contemporary mythmaking.
What is often forgotten in the grandeur of such projects is the violence that precedes their construction. Villages were displaced to make way for the Statue of Unity. Local communities, particularly Adivasi populations, were relocated or marginalised, and their protests were swiftly suppressed. In the official narrative, these sacrifices become necessary collateral for national pride. But when pride comes at the cost of erasure, the monument ceases to be commemorative. It becomes coercive. It says: remember what we want you to remember, and forget the rest.
A similar dynamic unfolds in the American South, where Confederate monuments have become sites of intense political contestation. These statues, many erected not immediately after the Civil War but during the Jim Crow era, were never neutral artefacts of history. They were designed to communicate racial hierarchy, to reinforce white supremacy under the guise of honouring Southern heritage. By placing statues of Confederate generals in public squares and courthouses, local governments were not preserving history. They were encoding a message in stone: who mattered, who ruled, and who should remain silent.
The longevity of these monuments lends them a false sense of legitimacy. Over time, people forget the contexts of their construction and accept their presence as organic. This is the myth of permanence. It implies that what is old is sacred, what is grand is righteous, and what is visible must be true. This myth is dangerous because it obscures the constructed nature of public memory. It confuses presence with moral authority, height with ethical weight.
Architectural nationalism thrives on this confusion. By monumentalising select figures and events, states create a curated version of the past that serves present-day interests. In doing so, they collapse the distinction between history and propaganda. The aesthetic strategies used in these projects — scale, materiality, symmetry — are not incidental. They are deliberate mechanisms of awe. The viewer, dwarfed by stone, is encouraged to feel reverence rather than ask questions. Monuments become performative spaces where power is aestheticised. The state speaks not through policy but through stone, and stone does not invite dialogue.
This is not to say that all monuments are inherently oppressive. Memorials that are self-reflective, temporally grounded, or open to reinterpretation can foster collective healing. Consider the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, which resists didacticism and instead invites contemplation and discomfort. It does not provide a singular narrative but asks the visitor to engage with absence, silence, and the incomprehensibility of loss. Such spaces do not celebrate power. They confront its consequences.
The problem lies not with commemoration itself but with the politics of who is commemorated, how, and to what end. When monuments are built without consensus, when they erase dissent, when they weaponise nostalgia, they cease to be sites of memory. They become instruments of forgetting. They trade history’s complexity for ideological clarity. They reduce the messy multiplicity of the past to a singular, polished image — always heroic, always righteous, always larger than life.
In many postcolonial contexts, this impulse takes on a different but equally problematic form. The desire to reclaim history from colonial narratives often results in the elevation of mythic national heroes, uncontested and deified. The danger here is that in trying to decolonise public memory, the state can fall into the trap of replacing one hegemonic narrative with another. Instead of opening space for multiple histories to coexist, it re-inscribes the logic of domination through monumental scale and singularity. In this framework, statues are not built to commemorate. They are built to conquer.
This raises an urgent question: who decides what is worth remembering? And what do we owe the past, if not fidelity? A truly democratic memory culture would resist the seduction of permanence. It would allow monuments to decay, to be replaced, to be debated. It would treat history not as a finished script but as an ongoing conversation. To monumentalise is to freeze. But memory, like identity, must be dynamic. Stone, after all, can crack. Narratives can be revised. And perhaps the most honest monument is not the one that stands forever, but the one that leaves room for being questioned.
