Ram Vanji Sutar: The Man Who Sculpted India's Memory

January 6, 2026 Surbhi Chadha

Last December, at 100, Ram Vanji Sutar breathed his last in Noida. Most obituaries led with the same fact: he'd created the Statue of Unity, the world's tallest statue at 597 feet.

What they didn't always mention was that if you've walked through an Indian airport, visited Parliament, or stopped at a highway memorial, you've probably stood before his work without knowing his name.

Sutar didn’t begin with massive monuments. He started by winning a gold medal at Mumbai’s J.J. School of Art, followed by a bronze bust of Mahatma Gandhi in 1947, when India had just become independent.

Over more than seventy years, his journey from sma

ll portrait sculptures to huge public monuments shaped not only his career, but also how Indians see their history in public spaces.

A Gallery in Bronze

An 18-foot-tall bronze statue installed at the Parliament House in New Delhi and at the Bhakra Dam in Punjab in 1995.

Step into the Central Hall of Parliament and you are surrounded by his work. Statues of Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and Sardar Patel were all made by Sutar.

Add to that the large Shivaji memorials, the Sardar Patel statue in Ahmedabad that came before the Statue of Unity, and 50+ monumental sculptures. Many of these have become landmarks.

A 40-foot-tall bronze statue of Lord Krishna, “Vishwa Roop,” to be installed at Jyotisar, Haryana.

His work appears across the country. Major airports, government buildings, and memorial sites all carry his signature, even if his name isn’t widely known.

This was not traditional village craft passed down through generations. Sutar’s work sat at the intersection of art and engineering. He set up a foundry with his son Anil, capable of producing sculptures that needed tonnes of bronze and years of planning.

Creating a statue that stands 65 feet tall is very different from casting a small bronze figure. These sculptures couldn’t be made by hand alone. They needed industrial facilities, careful measurements, and close work with engineers and construction teams.

What makes Sutar’s work stand out is that, even at this scale, he never lost the artist’s touch. A portrait sculptor focuses on expressions, posture, and small details that show personality.

Sutar managed to carry that sensitivity into enormous monuments, where size, distance, and multiple viewing angles change everything. Doing this well required not just technical skill, but a deep understanding of form, balance, and presence.

The Tallest Monument, The Hidden Name

Sculptor of the world’s largest bronze statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (182 metres), Gujarat, 2018.

The Statue of Unity took shape over many years. It featured detailed design work, high-level engineering, and close collaboration with L&T, the company that built it.

At 597 feet, it claimed the record for world's tallest statue, a monument to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel standing in Gujarat's Narmada district.

Sutar designed every detail - the posture, the drape of the shawl, the expression. The statue's face alone is 70 feet high. The hands, massive bronze forms, had to convey strength without aggression, dignity without stiffness.

But when it was unveiled in 2018, the headlines belonged to the inauguration, the political moment, the cost, ₹3,000 crores, a figure that dominated coverage.

The sculptor's name appeared, but rarely first. Search for "Statue of Unity" today and you'll find articles about tourism numbers, about the engineering marvel, about political symbolism. Sutar's role is mentioned, certainly, but it's contextual, not central.

The sculptor, despite creating the actual physical form that defines the monument, becomes part of the project's backstory rather than its identity.

He Was a Master of Murals Too

Whilst Sutar's monumental sculptures defined India's public spaces, his mastery extended equally to mural art. These were large scale relief works that translated historical narratives into bronze and fibreglass.

A glimpse of the Mural artwork by Ram Vanji Sutar

His major mural works included:

16 ft bronze relief of Rajiv Gandhi's life at Veer Bhumi, New Delhi
Four 22 ft by 7 ft panels on Nadaprabhu Kempegowda's founding of Bengaluru
16 ft by 40 ft fibreglass mural at Pune Airport
Military commemoration series
12 ft by 20 ft bronze mural of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's office
"Samudra Manthan" relief (1952)

These works proved that monumental storytelling required more than vertical scale. It demanded the horizontal sweep of narrative relief.

Commissioned Art, Complex Legacy

That's the reality of commissioned public art, and it's worth being clear-eyed about it. Sutar got paid well.

Honoured With the Padmashree Award’ by K.R. Narayanan, President of India

He received the Padma Shri in 1999 and was also honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 2016. He worked on projects that guaranteed steady income and national visibility. For a sculptor, particularly one working in an independent India still building its symbolic infrastructure, this was meaningful work with real impact.

But the subjects weren't chosen by him. They were determined by governments, committees, and political priorities. Public memory shaped by who held power at any given moment. Gandhi and Patel, yes - figures

whose bronze likenesses serve clear nation-building narratives. Social reformers, regional heroes, lesser-known freedom fighters?

Those commissions came less frequently, if at all. Sutar's extraordinary skill gave form to the nation's memory, but he didn't control which memories got cast in bronze and which didn't.

This isn't unique to India or to Sutar. Commissioned artists throughout history have worked within constraints set by patrons. Michelangelo painted what the Pope wanted painted.

The President of Mongolia, H.E. Kh. Battulga, honoured Shri Ram V. Sutar with the Polar Star Award for creating the Buddha statue in Mongolia.

Court sculptors across every culture created what rulers demanded. The question isn't whether Sutar compromised, all working artists make practical decisions, but what gets emphasised when we talk about his legacy.

What He Actually Built

Dismissing his work as mere execution, though, misses what Sutar actually accomplished.

The foundry he established with Anil became infrastructure. Before Sutar, India lacked the capability to create bronze monuments at this scale domestically. His facility changed that, becoming a training ground for techniques that barely existed in the country before.

He worked across mediums and scales, be it terracotta, bronze, or stone. Each material presents different challenges. Bronze casting at small scale follows centuries-old techniques; at monument scale, it requires solving problems of weight distribution, structural integrity, thermal expansion, weather resistance.

A 60-foot statue isn't just a small statue made bigger. It's a different category of engineering problem.

Sutar constantly problem-solved how to make massive works structurally sound, visually balanced from multiple viewing angles, and capable of withstanding monsoons and heat. His collaboration with his son turned sculpture into a multigenerational practice, adapting traditional techniques to industrial demands.

That knowledge transfer matters. It's not just about the monuments standing now but about the expertise that continues.

Recognition, Late and Secondary

Sutar worked for decades before national awards arrived. The Padma Shri came in 1999, he was already in his 70s by then, after more than 50 years of practice. The Padma Bhushan followed in 2016, when he was 91.

Late-career recognition is common for artists, but it's worth noting that his most visible works - the Parliament sculptures, the major memorials, were already decades old by the time formal honours caught up.

Even with awards, his sculptures defined national spaces whilst his name stayed in the background. The invisibility isn't unique to him, public art everywhere faces this dynamic. Architects get more credit than structural engineers.

Monument designers get more recognition than the craftspeople who execute the work. But in India, where craft traditions have always struggled for recognition beyond "heritage" branding, and where monumental art increasingly serves political iconography, that invisibility carries particular weight.

When monuments rise, when leaders get immortalised in bronze, someone designed that immortality. Someone solved the engineering problems, refined the proportions, made the abstract idea physically real.

The gap between creator and credit, between skilled work and headlines, matters because it shapes how we value artistic labour itself.

Remembering the Makers, Our Mission

At TuDuGu, we believe that remembering the maker's name matters as much as admiring the work itself.

India's artisan traditions, whether monumental bronze casting or village level handloom weaving, share a common challenge: the gap between creator and recognition. We're building a marketplace where craftspeople aren't invisible suppliers in someone else's story, but the story itself.

Every product on our platform connects directly to the artisan who made it, preserving not just techniques but the names, faces, and narratives behind generations of skill. Because when craft becomes anonymous, we lose more than attribution, we lose the human connection that makes traditional work meaningful.

Sutar's legacy reminds us why that connection matters, and why platforms like ours exist: to ensure that in India's craft economy, makers get credit alongside their creations.