No figure in the contemporary politics of statues is more contested than Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Streetscapes around the world bear Gandhi’s name or his likenesses. In more recent years, statues of the Mahatma have come under attack or become controversial, in places as varied as Ottawa, Amsterdam, Washington D.C., Davis, Melbourne and Accra. A few, but not all, incidents followed the internationalisation of the Black Lives Matter Movement after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020. While Gandhi may be a marginalised figure at home today, his image is promoted by the government of India overseas. His fate reveals the complexity of postcolonial memorialisation in a way few other historical figures do.The present reckoning against memorialisation in the form of statues began in South Africa with the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement of 2015 directed against a statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, which ended with the university council successfully having the statue removed. It was also in South Africa where Gandhi arrived as a barrister in 1893 and where his statements about Black South Africans have since become a source of sustained controversy.Engaged by Dada Abdulla & Company, Gandhi’s legal standing in a South Africa that was yet to become a unified country ran through the Government of India in Calcutta and the India Office in London. His encounters with Black Africans, Chinese, Malays and others occurred outside this framework: they were not his clients, constituents or legal responsibility.The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire, Rahul Rao, Pluto Press, 2025.Only in the years before he left South Africa, as he began to move away from the profession and committed himself to full-time politics, did he begin to speak in the universal register that his earlier position had made structurally unavailable to him. In South Africa, the struggle he waged was on behalf of Indians around him and those in other parts of the world reeling under the indenture system. His pronouncements in those early years on the continent must be read in this context. To judge the racial grammar of those years by the standards of the man who would later walk into the sea at Dandi is to disregard the evolution of his thought.In The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire, Rahul Rao’s sweep is transnational and, as a result, ambitious. His text treats the global politics of race and statues with rare seriousness and skill. Rao has been working on this theme for a number of years with many of his initial ideas and arguments first appearing on the blog The Disorder of Things. It is a rich theoretical intervention in a debate that is impossible to avoid: these statues, after all, occupy public space and cannot easily be ignored.In his reading of Gandhi, Rao wisely observes that attitudes towards him do not map neatly onto power, for Gandhi is revered and reviled by both elites and subalterns: he is simultaneously claimed and repudiated across every axis of power and resistance. Even the Indian state continues to export his image abroad as cultural diplomacy, deriving prestige from a figure of global renown. Rao surveys the accusations levelled against Gandhi on race and caste carefully, overlooking none of them. Yet the framing of Gandhi in these pages invites some scrutiny.Rao’s case about Gandhi’s alleged racism heavily relies on one text, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire, a book by Ashwin Desai and Goolam H. Vahed. Desai and Vahed ignore the context Gandhi was working in, and misread his struggle against indenture, claiming he was indifferent to the plight of indentured labourers. Gandhi’s friend Charles Freer Andrews was documenting the conditions of Indians in indentured labour in South Africa and Fiji and Gandhi made it his mission to petition the British to abolish that oppressive system, which was finally achieved in 1920.Rao notes Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s correspondence with the Black American thinker W.E.B. Du Bois. However, it is equally the case that no Indian leader exercised as powerful a hold on Du Bois’ political imagination as Gandhi. Du Bois, who was friends with Andrews, believed that the United States of America “was not civilised enough to receive him as an honoured guest”. The preceding quote, from his piece “Gandhi and American Negroes”, has Du Bois later strike out the word “him” which he replaces with “a coloured man”.The Crisis, a publication founded by Du Bois as the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), thought of Gandhi as “the greatest coloured man in the world, and perhaps the greatest man in the world” and, crucially, mentioned the “twenty years he toiled in South Africa to remove race prejudice (emphasis mine)”.Pitting Gandhi against Ambedkar also overlooks the fact that Gandhi was the only leader of an all-India stature engaging publicly with Ambedkar. Many of Ambedkar’s contemporaries were indifferent to or hostile towards him. The critique of Gandhi on caste is legitimate, but it needs to reckon with the political landscape he was actually operating in, not an imagined one. The most prominent leaders of the Indian National Congress and even “progressive” ones on the Left were largely uninterested in caste as a structural question.In presenting the two figures in oppositional terms, we also fail to observe things that brought them together: a move away from statist and institutional forms of politics and a deep commitment to faith itself, Hinduism in Gandhi’s case and Buddhism in Ambedkar’s.Rao’s geographical breadth, which takes the reader from Cape Town to Oxford to Bristol to the American South to Accra to Gujarat, is the book’s great strength, yet it is precisely this that at times limits the granularity each case demands. The book is at its most persuasive as a philosophical intervention, deftly mapping the ideological contests these statues provoke, even as the historical record occasionally calls for closer attention.In India, statues are proxies for a more fundamental question: whose present counts? Gandhi’s or Ambedkar’s or Patel’s? The answer depends entirely on who is being asked. That there is no consensus is, perhaps, a testament to the country’s democratic vitality. Nearly eight decades after independence, the argument over who belongs in the national pantheon remains unresolved and, one might venture, unresolvable. These figures did what history demanded of them and left behind a nation for its people to inhabit and carry forward. India’s greatest achievement may yet be its refusal to settle on a pantheon at all.Arko Dasgupta is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. He was previously a doctoral fellow at Duke University.