A major Kolkata landmark that had disappeared overnight 12 years ago, leaving the city in shock, has been found. Paroma, a 31-foot sculpture conceptualised by painter and sculptor Shanu Lahiri as a work of public art and built in collaboration with other artists, had towered from a roundabout on the arterial Eastern Metropolitan (EM) Bypass. It was destroyed and removed during the night of November 24, 2014, without any witness. Only some rubble remained. For long after the sculpture disappeared, the brutal act haunted the city. A later report in the newspaper The Telegraph claimed that the KMDA (Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority), a city planning agency functioning under the government of West Bengal, had removed the sculpture, acting on an order from Firhad Hakim, a minister in the then Trinamul Congress (TMC) government who later became the mayor of Kolkata.The Paroma sculpture, when it stood on the EM Bypass in Kolkata. Photo: Biswarup Ganguly, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia CommonsHakim was reported by the same newspaper as saying that the statue was being relocated and was broken down by mistake. Soon after the sculpture’s removal, a 200-kg giant metal globe bearing the Bengali letter “ব” (“ba”), the brand of the TMC government, came up in its place. In 2026, when the TMC’s 15-year-reign ended, the new BJP government acted swiftly to erase the letter “ব” from the globe. The BJP government has been in an overdrive in the state, removing the often-grotesque statuary and other signs of the TMC reign from across the city, even as organisations associated with the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, such as Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarhi Parishad (ABVP) and others, have gone on a rampage attacking public universities and churches in the city and the state. The takeover of public space and institutions by governments is being officialised by increasing violence. Paroma’s absence was always a reminder of that. §But even as the city kept wondering how exactly such a large sculpture could be destroyed within hours and removed without a trace, Paroma had lived on. A few days after the disappearance, a Kolkata resident who belonged to the Chinese community had found Paroma dumped on the road in an East Kolkata Wetlands locality, not far from where it originally stood. Since then the sculpture, a few feet gone from its base, and therefore not upright any more, has been resting in his home. The statue itself had a height of about 17 feet; it has lost about five feet. Its stand measured about 14 feet. Made of brick and mortar, the stand could be reduced to dust easily. The sculpture was made of fibre glass; it survived. All these 12 years, Hui Hao Howard Lee, the 52-year-old who had found Paroma, did not feel up to talking about the recovered landmark in public. Now Lee – “I am a Bengali,” he says – feels that the city should know about it. On hearing from his mother-in-law, who had gone to visit a Chinese temple in the East Kolkata Wetlands locality of Chowbaga and thought she saw Paroma dumped there, Lee had hurried to Chowbaga and saw that it was indeed the landmark lying on the ground. “I saw some boys playing,” says Lee. When they acted proprietorially, Lee paid them some money and brought Paroma to his home in Tangra, a locality off the Park Circus connector, not far from where Paroma had been installed in 1987. The recovered Paroma statue at Lee’s former tannery in Kolkata. Photo: Ayana Bhattacharya.Tangra was once populated by the Chinese community, which, too, is disappearing fast from this city. As is the East Kolkata Wetlands. Kolkata is a city of fast disappearing legacies, built and natural. “I was overjoyed and relieved to find the sculpture,” says Lee. “I thanked God that I could salvage whatever was left of it. I even asked the boys to find the remaining parts,” he adds. Lee is an avid art collector, particularly of Bengal art. He was well aware of Paroma’s value as a work of art. Shanu Lahiri’s large-scale works of public art, including bright murals, had lit up the city space. Her work had depicted city labour. One of her other large public artworks, a 200-metre long mural on a wall in the Elgin Road area in central Kolkata, had been whitewashed unaccountably in November 2018.Paroma had another meaning for Lee, who came to know about Shanu’s art only later in life. The sculpture was a part of his childhood. Having grown up in Tangra, as children, Lee and his brother would often climb up the spiralling statue base. “We had photographs of us on the statue,” says Lee. He brought back the recovered Paroma in a small truck and laid it out on the vast floor of what used to be the Lee family tannery. Lee and his family live in a different part of the same building. The original tannery has now been relocated to the East Kolkata Wetlands, following a state government decision about two decades ago to shift tanneries to the wetlands. §Shanu Lahiri visualised public art as something more than a work that occupies public space. It was art for the people, the city, which brought people together, in its making and in the experiencing of it. Shanu had conceptualised Paroma, but had collaborated with other artists like Manik Talukdar and Debojit Chakraborty, along with young art graduates – Shanu had taught art at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata – to create Paroma. Paroma work-in-progress in a neighbour’s front yard in Lake Town, October, 1985. The project was sponsored by G.D. Pharmaceuticals. Photograph by Suman Datta. Source: The Shanu Lahiri Archives, Kolkata.The large dimensions of her public art also required collaboration. Paroma had been funded by a private company, GD Pharmaceuticals, the makers of the antiseptic cream venerated by Bengalis, Boroline. Installed during the Left regime in Bengal, it was not funded by the government. It was inspired by the ‘Diwali putul’, a Bengali folk art figure, a composite of a lamp and a woman or a mother, who sheds light with her protective presence. Paroma was a still point for the passing city to see. Its silhouette gave the skyline and the landscape around it its distinct character. Birds would nest on it. Children would climb up on it. Perhaps a better example of public art is hard to find. §Seeing Paroma again, on the floor of a most unusual gallery, a large, empty, barely-lit former tannery, is heartstopping, but also slightly eerie. It is like seeing something brought back to life – and to see Paroma broken so is to relive the violence it was subjected to. One feels shattered again. Yet, it is there: a beloved, familiar piece of the city, which could not be destroyed. It leads to the question: What does one do with a recovered landmark? The recovered Paroma statue. Photo: Ayana Bhattacharya.“Only recently was I told that the sculpture survives,” says educator and activist Damayanti Lahiri, artist Shanu’s daughter. She was informed by a friend who is also Lee’s family friend. Just a handful of people in Lee’s circle knew that Paroma had been found. Damayanti informed a few people in the art community. “I had been shocked by its removal,” says noted contemporary artist Chittrovanu Mazumdar, also Shanu’s nephew, her brother artist Nirode Mazumdar’s son. But a recovered sculpture is not the same as the original. “It is a fragment,” he reminds. “Art has a natural difficulty to survive. Its materials are not durable,” says Mazumdar. “Taking a work of art down is a very violent act,” he says. Paroma, based on the Diwali putul was a mother figure, giving light, built up into a large sculpture as Paroma, the artist points out. “It was something we were used to seeing every day,” says Mazumdar.Uprisings often lead to brutal acts of vandalism. The recent Bangladesh upheaval or the Naxalite movement in Bengal are examples. “But you cannot erase history,” says Mazumdar. However, you cannot just reinstall a former landmark either: it is a different thing. A preparatory sketch and plan of Paroma. Designed by Jean-Fré Chevallier. Source: The Shanu Lahiri Archives, Kolkata.Damayanti Lahiri, who has run campaigns with other to keep Paroma’s memory alive, agrees. But Lee, who preserved Paroma, should have a say, she strongly feels, in deciding what to do with the sculpture. §Paroma’s recovery, feels leading art historian Tapati Guha-Thakurta, whose work has contributed towards the recognition of Durga Puja, the biggest Bengali Hindu festival, as public art, points at the role the authorities play – or do not – in the recognition and preservation of public art. “Another remarkable piece of art disappeared after Paroma’s removal. A Meera Mukherjee sculpture that was installed in Rabindra Sadan complex is not there any more,” Guha-Thakurta points out. This has gone largely unnoticed. The same Rabindra Sadan-Nandan complex houses three Somnath Hore sculptures. They do not look very well cared for either, Guha-Thakurta adds.KMDA officials who had carried out Paroma’s demolition had admitted in The Telegraph report that they did not know anything about the landmark as a work of art. Besides, says Guha-Thakurta, Paroma had changed already at the time of its disappearance, because the landscape around it had changed. Guha-Thakurta has co-curated a just-concluded exhibition on Shanu Lahiri in Mumbai, in the run-up to the centennial celebrations of the artist that begin next year. When Paroma was installed on the bypass, its backdrop was an uninterrupted sky. By the time it was gone, a thick growth of highrises and other construction had filled up the area. “So in a way, it was already not what it was previously,” says Guha-Thakurta. So how does a city like Kolkata take care of its public art, asks Guha-Thakurta. Does it depend on private individuals? But then does the art remain public? §At the same time, Paroma’s discovery is in keeping with its nature, feels Nabina Gupta, artist, co-curator of the Shanu Lahiri exhibition, and founder-director Disappearing Dialogues, a Kolkata-based platform that engages with environmental and cultural practices that are becoming invisible.The maquette of the concrete base of Paroma displayed alongside the memory card at a recent exhibition of the artist’s works at Galerie 88, Kolkata. Source: The Shanu Lahiri Archives, Kolkata.Paroma memory card to commemorate the demolition of the open-air sculpture in November 2014, after standing at the site for twenty seven years. Designed by Jean-Fré Chevallier. Source: The Shanu Lahiri Archives, Kolkata.“It is so right that a citizen and an art lover, who has a personal connection with the piece of art, finds it and looks after it. It shows how art functions in society and how citizens shape the city’s thought process,” says Gupta. Public art takes art out of the gallery, breaks down the hierarchy and the elitism that often comes with galleries. Paroma still represents that, powerfully. “But as a city we have not done a great job of preserving public art, irrespective of regime changes. Or of making space for enough public art engagements,” says Ayana Bhattacharya, a PhD researcher associated with The Shanu Lahiri Archives. Gupta is also part of the archive, which contributed in a major was to the exhibition. The making of the Paroma sculpture was a highlight of the exhibition, where Shanu Lahiri’s drawing of Paroma and a maquette of the stand were on display..”The Biswa Bangla globe that replaced Paroma has been altered already. What will finally come up in that place?” asks Bhattacharya.“Paroma deserves to be archived and reframed as a practice. But it is a fragment,” she says. Maybe the city will show the way. Damayanti informs that this year during Durga Puja the pandal at Abasar Sarbajain Durga Puja in Bhawanipore in the city is putting up a large Paroma replica. Shanu Lahiri had passed away in 2013, one year before Paroma was removed. How would she have reacted to the vicissitudes faced by her work? “She would not have been sentimental about it at all,” laughs Damayanti. Chandrima S. Bhattacharya lives and reports from Kolkata.