by CORY FLINTOFF
Stone elephants line a newly inaugurated park dedicated to Dalit, or lower caste, leaders in a suburb of New Delhi, India. Mayawati, a politician known as the “Dalit queen,” says previous governments did nothing to honor the leaders who fought for Dalit rights. PHOTO/PANKAJ NAGIA/AP
In India, a land of ancient monuments, people are talking about a newly built monument for the nation’s most marginalized people.
It’s a memorial to India’s Dalits, the people once called “untouchables,” and it was built by the country’s most powerful Dalit politician.
The Indian monument best known to Westerners is the Taj Mahal, but the country is bejeweled with magnificent temples and palaces, built by whoever happened to be ruling India at any given time.
This latest monument continues that tradition: It’s a colossal domed building carved from pink sandstone.
It sits in a park across the river from the Indian capital, New Delhi, and is flanked by 24 life-sized statues of elephants, with their trunks raised in a gesture of welcome.
The elephant is the symbol of the Bahujan Samaj Party, and this memorial is very much a project of the BSP and its leader, the Dalit politician known simply as Mayawati.
“[The monument] almost takes you back to antiquity and the old, medieval days and ancient days where the emperors used to build these things,” says journalist Ajoy Bose, the author of a biography of Mayawati.
Bose says the memorial is calculated to do for her just what the monuments of old did for the emperors: to simultaneously flaunt and preserve her power.
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