The TOI correspondent from Washington: US President Donald Trump is planning to install a statue of explorer Christopher Columbus on White House grounds in yet another move to reshape the nation’s historical narrative through a distinctly nativist MAGA lens that tangentially involves India. The decision, pending final logistical approvals, is the latest flashpoint in the cultural and political battle over how the United States understands its origins— a story some historians and critics say valorizes brigands and freebooters who plundered a “stolen land” but one Trump says is "heroic."
Born in Genoa, Italy, Columbus, funded by the Spanish monarchy, set out in 1492 not to discover a new continent, but to find a westward sea route to India and its riches. He believed—wrongly, because of flawed calculations that underestimated the Earth’s circumference by a quarter —that India lay just a few thousand miles west of Europe as he sought to circumvent the Ottoman controlled territory to reach India.
