First Partition Museum to ‘promote reconciliation’
The first museum dedicated to those who survived the chaotic and bloody period after Partition has opened, as India and Pakistan mark 70 years as independent nations.
“If you look at any other country in the world, they’ve all memorialised the experiences that have defined and shaped them,” said Mallika Ahluwalia, chief executive of the Partition Museum.
“Yet this event that has so deeply shaped not only our subcontinent, but millions of people who were affected, has had no museum or memorial 70 years later.”
The exhibitions, housed in the town hall building in the north Indian border city of Amritsar, include photographs, newspaper clippings and donated personal items to tell the story of how the region’s struggle for freedom from colonial rule turned into one of its most violent episodes.
Community clashes killed hundreds of thousands of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, and displaced another 15 million.
Exhibits include an antique pocket watch that belonged to someone killed in mob violence in Pakistan, woven fabrics from craftsmen at the time, a traditional rope cot carried by a refugee across the border, and many old blackand-white family photos.
Screens show video interviews with elderly survivors. The last of the museum’s 14 showrooms is called the Gallery of Hope, where visitors are invited to write messages of love and peace on leaf-shaped papers before hanging them on a barbed-wire tree.
The idea, Ms Ahluwalia said, was to have visitors take part in “greening” the tree and to think of peace and reconciliation between the torn nations.
“You end up feeling so grateful to that generation who, I think, helped to rebuild the nation, despite having suffered such trauma,” she said.
Ms Ahluwalia said she wanted to open the museum after years of hearing her 83-yearold grandmother’s tales of the subcontinent before it was divided, before she fled her Pakistani home as a girl aged 13.
“What must it have felt like for her, to one day come from a relatively affluent family, have a normal background, and the next day all you have left of your things is a small suitcase,” she said.
Her grandmother’s experiences led Ms Ahluwalia to believe it was important to set up the museum, “especially as we saw that generation leaving us”.
Tickets are priced low, at 10 rupees (60 fils) for Indians and 150 rupees for foreigners, to encourage more visitors.
The museum is run as a non-profit trust that has raised money from people including Indian advertising giant Suhel Seth and companies including Airtel and the Hindustan
Times. The Punjabi government donated the space.
While the bloody events of Partition became a foundation stone of India’s history and identity, sparking count-
less works of art, literature and film, there has been no official expression of regret.
India’s leaders have been cautious in mentioning the community violence that coincided with the country’s earliest days after winning independence.
Yesterday, prime minister Narendra Modi made no mention of Partition while regaling the country’s freedom fighters in his annual Independence Day speech.
Sociologist Shiv Visvanathan said the topic had been too painful for many to dwell on. Even the museum, Mr Visvanathan said, should reflect realities on both sides.
“If a nation-state becomes the repository of memory, it becomes a one-sided memory,” he said. “We have to acknowledge the mutuality of violence. There is no one truth, no one victim.”
The museum is in the heart of Amritsar, best known for its Sikh Golden Temple, because the Punjabi city was one of the first points of arrival for millions of refugees to India.
Dozens of people donated items to the museum, including Sohinder Nath Chopra, 81, who included an autobiographical novel set in his old village near Gujranwala in Pakistan.
His family had been warned by a Muslim cleric to flee the village as armed mobs went on killing sprees against Hindus and Sikhs in the newly declared Islamic republic.
Mr Chopra was 12 years old when his family crossed the border into India and remembers “big arches welcoming the refugees”.
“Hindi film songs were being played,” he said. “There were people standing holding bread, vegetables, water. And everybody started crying.”