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Singapore Airlines planes at Changi Airport.

A nation without monuments

Every country has its monuments, which glorify great men of the past (and less frequently, great women), commemorate battles won and lost, and represent the nation’s ideals. Even colonies have monuments, erected on behalf of the colonial power and often paid for by the subjects. When a colony declares independence, the monuments of the colonial power are often the first to be torn down. In 1776, American colonists toppled statues of King George III. After 1947, when India parted ways with the British Empire, statues of British monarchs were moved to museums or shipped off to Canada.

The now-empty pedestals in roundabouts and parks were soon occupied by statues of the new heroes of the independent nation: Mahatma Gandhi, Netaji Subhash, Pandit Nehru. Buildings and streets likewise received new identities: Kingsway in New Delhi became Rajpath, the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay became Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya. For that matter, Bombay itself was rechristened, becoming Mumbai. Just about the only thing that wasn’t renamed was the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata. A larger-than-life statue of the elderly sovereign remains in place in front of the wedding-cake building, but the interior now features a museum commemorating the independence struggle.

The example of India is not unique. Around the world, political changes usually lead to a flurry of renaming of streets and dismantling and rebuilding of monuments.

By comparison, the example of Singapore is unusual. Singapore has been an independent, sovereign nation for more than fifty years, but there has been little of the renaming and reinventing of the city-state that has happened in most other former colonies. A statue of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who founded Singapore in 1819, still stands cockily over the waterfront. Most streets retain their colonial names. While there are plenty of historical markers for the colonial period and the Japanese occupation during World War II, there are no statues for Lee Kuan Yew, the country’s first prime minister—even though he served for more than thirty years and was a central figure in the modernization of the city-state.1

Statue of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles in Singapore.

Statue of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles in Singapore.

On first blush, it might seem that modern Singapore is lacking in a sense of identity, which other former colonies have gone to great lengths to cultivate. I certainly felt that way when I visited two years ago. But on further reflection, not having statues of modern heroes all over the place is a part of Singapore’s identity. It shows that the country is open to the world—or at least the modern, prosperous parts of it. With its gleaming high-rises and booming economy, Singapore itself is a monument to Lee Kuan Yew.

Singapore's monument to the Great War, which is inscribed in honor of the fallen of World War II on the back side.

Singapore’s monument to the fallen soldiers of the World Wars.

A sign on Connaught Drive, pointing to a historical marker about World War II. (The marker is located on the site of a memorial for the Japanese-affiliated Indian National Army, which was dynamited by Mountbatten’s troops after they retook Singapore in 1945.)

A sign on Connaught Drive, pointing to a historical marker about World War II. (The marker is located on the site of a memorial for the Japanese-affiliated Indian National Army, which was dynamited by Mountbatten’s troops after they retook Singapore in 1945.)

  1. C.M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore (Oxford, 1988), 320-21. []
Brooklyn Bridges pan

Exploring Brooklyn’s battlefield

In 2014, I spent part of the summer in Washington, DC, researching for my dissertation at the National Archives and Library of Congress. On weekends and some afternoons, I explored the city and surrounding region, and I even made longer trips to Pennsylvania and New York. As I traveled around, I kept running across sites or artifacts associated with the American Revolutionary War. The more I saw and read about the Revolution, the more I became aware of how little I knew about that part of history.

I made up my mind to read The Glorious Cause, by Robert Middlekauff, the volume of the Oxford History of the United States about the Revolution. The book is long, so it took me a while (I had to take a lengthy break in the middle), but it was worth reading, because I learned much that I, as a historian of the twentieth century, had never before had occasion to learn. (Since my fateful summer of 2014, interest in the Revolutionary War has gone mainstream, thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton.)

While reading The Glorious Cause, I was particularly fascinated by Middlekauff’s narrative of the Battle of Long Island, also known as the Battle of Brooklyn—an engagement I had never heard of before. The Battle of Brooklyn (August 26-30, 1776) was the first major military engagement of the American Revolution after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence two months earlier. British troops, under the command of General William Howe, landed on Long Island and attacked the Americans under George Washington. (These events are covered in the Hamilton song “Right-hand Man.”) The American forces were protected behind the hills known as the Heights. The passes nearest the American positions in Brooklyn (then a village independent of Manhattan) were well defended, but the British circumvented the defenses by taking the lightly-defended Jamaica Pass to the east. A contingent of Marylanders died holding the main body of the British troops off at the Vechte farm, but most of the rest of Washington’s army escaped across the East River to Manhattan, surviving to fight another day.

In the 240 years since the battle, Brooklyn has grown to engulf the farmlands and woodlands where British and Continentals clashed. Scattered around the borough are sites associated with the battle, some marked with plaques, others not (but all listed in detail in this comprehensive guide). In addition to gentrified brownstones, hipster lofts, and forbidding project housing, Brooklyn has its own Revolutionary War battlefield. Brooklyn has it all.

In March this year, I spent a day exploring Brooklyn, looking for sites that had to do with the battle or the Revolution in general. I found two sites particularly interesting.

The first was Prospect Park, site of a pass where American troops were routed by Hessian mercenaries fighting on the British side. The park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead (whose other credits include Central Park in Manhattan and the US Capitol grounds) preserves part of the landscape of the battlefield, which has been lost under buildings and streets most everywhere else in the borough.

On a hillside in the park stands a monument to “Maryland’s Four Hundred,” who fell holding back the British (or “saved the American army,” in the exaggerated wording of the monument). The mention of the number of Marylanders is a not-so-subtle reference to the Three Hundred Spartans, who held the Persian army off at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, while the armies of other Greek city-states escaped to regroup and ultimately defeat the Persians. The placement of the monument to 400 Marylanders in the park, near the battle pass, is another reference to Thermopylae, because the Spartans died defending a pass. But despite the monument’s claim that the Marylanders performed their great deed “on this battlefield,” they did not fight in a pass; they fought on a farm, more than a mile from the monument.

Memorial to "Maryland's Four Hundred" in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

Memorial to “Maryland’s Four Hundred” in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

Misleading inscription on the memorial to "Maryland's Four Hundred."

Misleading inscription on the memorial to “Maryland’s Four Hundred.”

The site of that farm is the other especially interesting site related to the Battle of Brooklyn. The old farm is also a park—not a grand park like Prospect, but a small municipal park with a playground and athletic fields. In the middle of the park stands the Old Stone House. Originally built in 1699, the Vechte Farmhouse went to ruin and was demolished around 1900, but then in the 1930s the stones were dug up and the house reconstructed from drawings. The ground floor contains a small, free museum about the battle and its context.

The reconstructed Vechte farmhouse, Washington Park, Brooklyn.

The reconstructed Vechte farmhouse, Washington Park, Brooklyn.

The Old Stone House isn’t exactly the Vechte Farmhouse that stood there during the battle. It is a twentieth-century building made of seventeenth-century parts. But that doesn’t matter to me. What does matter is that there is plenty of continuity with the past, there and at other sites associated with the Battle of Brooklyn. There may be no national park for the battlefield, as there are for Saratoga and Yorktown. Instead, remnants of the eighteenth-century battle and its memorialization live on in twenty-first-century New York City.

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Willy Loves Monuments 2016

A rhesus macaque sits on a sign identifying the Sun Temple at Galta-ji (Jaipur) as a Rajasthan state protected monument.

A rhesus macaque sits on a sign identifying the Sun Temple at Galta-ji (Jaipur) as a Rajasthan state protected monument.

Last month, the Wikimedia Foundation staged a contest called Wiki Loves Monuments 2016. Users uploaded photos of national- and state-level protected monuments in participating countries (including India), and a jury would select the best photos in certain categories.

On September 1, I found out about WLM 2016 when I looked at Wikimedia’s most popular website, Wikipedia. A banner below the search bar announced: “Photograph a monument, help Wikipedia, and win.” I was delighted. Although I held no illusions that any of my photos would win a prize, I felt as if this contest had been made for me, and I for it. I’d spent the past year visiting all the protected monuments in Jaipur I could find. WLM 2016 gave me a reason to visit more of them. I went to some I had never seen before, and I also returned to some familiar monuments to take better pictures expressly for contribution to WLM 2016. In all, I uploaded 31 pictures of 19 different monuments, all but three of which are in Jaipur.

Wikipedia keeps state-by-state lists of the protected monuments in India. There are two lists for each state: one for the monuments protected by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), and the other for those under the jurisdiction of the state archeological departments. These lists are, unfortunately, rather muddled. Each monument has a distinct identifier, assigned by Wikipedia, identifying the state in which it is located and whether it is protected by ASI or the state. The monuments are organized by identifier, rather than a more sensible district-by-district arrangement. The state-level lists include only those monuments that are listed on the ASI site. (This is at least the case for Rajasthan.) The reason for this is that these are supposedly the only monuments that are recognized at the national level, but this distinction seems dubious to me. The Rajasthan state-level list for some reason repeats several monuments also on the ASI list. In past years, users had uploaded and tagged pictures of the wrong monuments. Two different ASI monuments were illustrated with pictures of the very modern Birla Mandir, which was consecrated in 1985 and has no archeological significance.

Some of the confusion in the Rajasthan state-level list is due to the official list. Some monuments have non-standard names or spellings. Others are not described clearly enough to be identifiable. I am almost certain that one of the monuments in Jaipur that even made it onto the Wikipedia list, “Cenotaphs on Station Road,” does not exist anymore. The site indicated as a cremation ground on an old map is now occupied by modern buildings.

The one thing that disappointed me about WLM 2016 was how incomplete the state-level list was for Rajasthan. I went out and photographed several attractive state-protected temples, but I couldn’t upload their pictures because they weren’t on Wikipedia’s purportedly official list.

But I can upload them on my own website. So here they are, Internet! These are some of the state-protected monuments of Jaipur that WLM 2016 missed. All of them are in the old capital Amber.

Panchmukhi Mahadev Temple backside

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Backside of Panchmukhi Mahadev Temple. This is one of two temples in the town with three shikharas (spires) like this.

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