At the country’s first Partition Museum, hope follows despair
The first physical museum dedicated to Partition, a defining moment in the history of the sub-continent that led to the momentous division of India and Pakistan on August 15, 1947, will be inaugurated by Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh here on Thursday.
The long-neglected Town Hall building at Katra Ahluwalia near the Golden Temple complex houses the museum on which work has been on for two years.
The shamianas (colourful tents) in the compound are 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. Hope follows despair here 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.
Sharing this, Kishwar Desai, the driving force behind the museum, says, “In the 50th year of Independence and Partition, I started working on Manto’s stories for TV. 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.”
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 of the border.