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It’s been two days since the unveiling of the statue of Subhas Chandra Bose near India Gate, and sculptor Arun Yogiraj hasn’t quite managed to shake off a feeling of disbelief.
On June 10, Yogiraj and his team of 45 people embarked on the formidable task of giving form to a 280-tonne hunk of rock in 75 days. And they pulled it off, save for the finishing touches.
On Saturday, after a whirlwind few months, the 38-year-old sculptor told The Indian Express that he is now looking forward to going home, in Mysuru, and unwinding for some time. “I have lost weight, I haven’t slept much, I need to relax a bit,” he says.
“Even as the deadline was very tight for a project as massive as this, one has to work backwards sometimes. The deadline, in fact, gave us a nice momentum,” says the sculptor. His team of 45 included stone artisans from Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan. “No machines were used in carving the 28-foot statue and all the work was done by hand tools,” he says.
Yogiraj says the toughest part was flipping the stone. “Sometimes that would take two days and we had to wait patiently while also worrying about losing man-days.”
Although he found no special feature particularly tough to carve, Yogiraj says he always had to keep in mind that while different people may be working on different aspects or features, it had to come together as a coherent whole.
“Once I was given the project, I left all my commissioned work or put it on hold to focus all my energies on this project of national importance,” he says. “Not only myself, several of my artist, sculptor friends also left their jobs at hand and helped me shape up this rock. After all, we had to find Netaji in this rock, and it wasn’t easy.”
While the sculpting part was executed by Yogiraj — who had earlier sculpted the idol of Adi Shankaracharya at Kedarnath — NBCC was assigned the responsibility of executing the mounting of the final statue, weighing 65 tonnes, without causing any damage to the heritage structure of the canopy.
Sources say the model was approved by the Prime Minister’s Office from among two-three options. A budget was also set for the sculptor and for the procuring of the granite stone, and other logistics.
While the statue was announced by the PM earlier this year, on January 21, it took a long time to finalise and procure the stone for the same. “We did long research for four to five months to finalise the stone, as we had to check the parameters like density, size, strength and how porous it is, and if it will be easy to chisel it or carve it, and how long the stone can be in the same shape,” says Rajat Mehta, Director of the Delhi-based firm Granite Studio India, whose firm was entrusted with the responsibility. “So after 4-5 months from where we started in January, we shortlisted 2-3 quarries along with Adwaita Gadanayak, Director of the National Gallery of Modern Art — one in Chhattisgarh, one in Karnataka, and a third one in Telangana (which was finalised)”
“After this, we started the extraction process. Small granite block samples of the same quarry were sent to the carving site in May to show it to the carver, the sculptor, and all the artists,” Mehta says. Sources say Mehta’s firm was given some parameters — the stone had to be jet black, the grain had to be fine. It should not have any pattern, deviations or variation.
But the hardest part was to transfer the block from Telangana to Delhi. “Transporting this kind of block has been the biggest task performed ever in history in the period of 12 days,” Mehta says, adding that generally, a timeline would be 40-45 days for such kind of transportation. Once it reached Delhi, the truck waited for a whole day outside the NGMA — the carving site — as it couldn’t get in.
Mehta’s firm has earlier worked with the government on the National War Memorial.
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