Taken in March of 2014 in Cubbon Park.

One of the little anomalies that surprised me when I moved to Bangalore last Fall was a set of statues of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII that are located in Cubbon Park.

There are a number of cities, towns, and other places named after British royalty in the eastern United States, but I always assumed that was because they were named before the Revolution and changing them would require getting American politicians to agree on something (other than the urgent need to eavesdrop on everybody’s communications.)

Edward VII, Emperor of England

Having statues up seems a little beyond vestigial names, however. Most of the Warsaw Pact countries ripped up their monuments to tyranny after the Cold War ended. Budapest created a nice open air park of Stalins, Lenins, Béla Kuns, and generic Stakhanovite workers.

I remember reading Michael Palin’s book, Himalaya, and he mentions having a moment of pause after passing from Pakistan into India near Amritsar. He had thought of the border crossing as representing a trip from risky and tumultuous Pakistan into safe and secure India. However, among the first sights he saw was a monument to the assassin who killed Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the tyrannical governor of Punjab, and a monument for 400 peaceful protesters massacred by British troops in 1919. This reminded him that a British man might not be the most welcome visitor in those parts.

I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t forgive and forget. Nor am I suggesting that one should lose sight of one’s history past the current regime. Those are both perfectly rationale and virtuous notions, but, yet, I’m still curious why those monuments remain.