Hope follows despair at Partition Museum
A day before the first physical museum dedicated to Partition is inaugurated by Punjab chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh in Amritsar, takes an exclusive sneak peek at this monument to the momentous division of India that led to the birth of Pakistan at
AMRITSAR: The pigeons who have made their home in the long-neglected Town Hall building at Katra Ahluwalia near the Golden Temple complex flutter their wings in surprise as their home is coloured, spruced up and gradually coming alive. This is the place chosen to house the Partition Museum on which work has been on for two years and is to be inaugurated by chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh on Thursday morning.
The (colourful tents) are up in the compound in contrast to the grim stories that a walk through this unhappy memory lane unfolds through poetry, first-person accounts, paintings, mementos, art and artefacts. But that is not all for hope follows despair at Partition Museum and this was the very purpose of collecting the pieces and reminding the generations to come that such a painful chapter of communal divide should not repeat itself in the history of the sub-continent, on the pattern of holocaust museums elsewhere in the world.
The inspiration for the museum came from the stories of Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who is remembered as a brutally honest chronicler of the violent divide. He belonged to Amritsar and his family home in Gali Vakilan was among the 40% houses burnt down in the communal violence during Partition.
This is revealed by Kishwar Desai, the driving force behind this first attempt of a museum of its kind in India. “In the 50th year of Independence and Partition, I started working on Manto’s stories for television. It was then that I thought there should be a museum to Partition and it has taken me two decades to translate this dream into reality,” says Desai.
Put together through individual efforts, supported by the government in giving this colonial building for display, the museum is to be seen as a work in progress with material related to 1947 trickling in as people share mementos related to the troubled times.
Why Amritsar? Because it was reduced to an inferno at that time with half the population fleeing across borders drawn by the Radcliffe Line. The city was the transit point of the massive migration on both sides of the border.
The museum beckons people with portraits in black and white of victims of this divide and witnesses who have lived to tell the wretched stories of the times. Walk in and there are more pictures, narratives on videos and paintings by a few artists of those times, including Satish Gujral, SL Prasher and Krishen Khanna who migrated from Lahore, the cultural capital of undivided India.
There is a hall of the freedom struggle with piped songs of resistance from the two regions most active in the struggle and finally cut into two pieces. We hear the plaintive poem by Amrita Pritam addressed to Waris Shah in which she points out the abduction, rape and killings of women.
A wall-hanging reads that 9,423 abducted women were recovered from India and sent to Pakistan between December 1947 and July 1948. 5,510 women abducted women recovered from Pakistan were sent to India.
Re-living all this pain, the viewer finds oneself in the Hall of Hope with paper hangings of migratory birds leading the way. This hall has a huge Tree of Hope fashioned out of barbed wire by designer Neeraj Sahai.
The museum has extensively delved into and displayed Hindustan Times archives to tell yesterday’s stories of despair in the hope that tomorrow’s generations will live in peace on both sides.