The question of memorialization has
never been an easy one. It becomes an important one as, “public museums,
memorials, and other historical sites play a crucial role in the construction
and maintenance of national mythologies, histories, and identities.”[1]
After seven decades, how does one undertake the arduous and complex task of remembering
a history where roughly twelve million people were displaced, and an estimated
million people were killed in communal rioting?[2]
In 2017, the world’s first-ever Partition
Museum was inaugurated in the border city of Amritsar in Punjab, India to
commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Partition of British India
in 1947. Positioned as a people’s museum, it houses archival documents
and State records, oral histories, art installations, personal letters, amongst
other everyday objects that survived the tumultuous migration crossing the
now-impenetrable India-Pakistan border. The Partition Museum is a collaborative
effort between the state government of Punjab and The Arts and Cultural
Heritage Trust (TAACHT). Nestled in the historic colonial building of Town
Hall, built in 1866 by the British as an administrative building, the museum describes
the colonial past leading up to the moment of Partition.
Laudable as an archival effort, it
is important to acknowledge that the Partition Museum is alive as a space where
visitors come and interact with the space and objects invoking affective labor for
both the spectator and the artefacts. However, the Partition Museum works as a
space of memory and mode of memorialization very often harboring nationalistic and
communal feelings through its architecture, curation of exhibits, spatial and
aural aesthetics. Cresswell articulates the essence of place memory as, “the
ability of place to make the past come to life in the present and thus contribute
to the production and reproduction of social memory.”[3]
His mediations on place and memory provide several frameworks to further think
about modes of memorialization of Partition. The process of which is about almost
seven decades after the event – which could even be attributed to the idea of post
belatedness of trauma made popular by scholar Cathy Caruth in memory studies. It
is also important to bear that the belatedness also could emerge from the
context and multiple meanings of silence that emerge in South Asian
cultures, where traumatic events are considered to be best kept veiled and
hidden.
The political decision of building
a museum representing “people’s history of Partition” in Amritsar, a city bearing
Partition’s bloody legacy, instead of the national capital of New Delhi. The
exhibition heavily emphasizes the role of Indian Punjab, diminishing important
Partition narratives from other parts like Bengal, Assam, Kashmir, Bombay, and
even Pakistan and Bangladesh. In another instance, a jarring and distasteful
life-sized installation of a saw cutting a wall into half is plopped in the
middle of one of the galleries, dramatically and literally screaming Partition.
What is dangerous about the spatial affects of such projects is the continued
deep-seated communal implications of 1947 – witnessed in the Sikh riots of 1984,
Gujarat carnage of 2002, and most recently in the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013. Any memorial dedicated to the event of Partition of 1947 should instead be enable its visitors to learn from the past and be self-reflexive about ongoing communal strife. Instead, it should not isolate the event to a moment in history, as the Partition Museum does through its design and
architecture of a walk-through chronological timeline of events. In the midst
of the rising right-wing Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) ideologies across the
country, such living memorials can terribly go wrong and turn into Statist projects instead of
working as sites of healing or foregrounding counter-narratives.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
Dickinson, Greg, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki. “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2006). doi: 10.1080/14791420500505619.
Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
[1] Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott and
Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and
Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication
and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2006), doi: 10.1080/14791420500505619.
[2] Urvashi Butalia, The
Other Side of Silence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 3.
[3] Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004) 87.
Hey Ritka,
ReplyDeleteExcellent post. Like the point you make about this being a statist project. It's easy for museums to have a chronological method of displaying information, but potentially lack the explicit demonstration of current issues between different walks of life and what not. How do we ensure that statist projects utilize self-reflexive techniques to challenge questionable moments and idea in time.
Both your post here and the presentation you gave in class last week are very interesting! I can't help but notice how you emphasize both that the Partition Museum is lauded as a "people's museum" and that it contains within it a certain set of silences. This theme of silence seems to arise as a kind of tension that all memorial projects must contend with - as a consequence of necessity, some narratives will gain currency in a memorial and others will not. Of course, we know this isn't just a matter of necessity, and that there are a multitude of individuals and institutions vested in performing and maintaining a certain narrative of events in all of these situations. I'd be curious to hear about some of the counter-hegemonic efforts of Indians whose stories are either not represented in or are actively excluded in the narrative of partition in the museum. We have discussed how these narratives tend to be elite-driven, but I think there are always mechanisms and spaces in which contested narratives can be seen. Thank you for bringing these perspectives into the class!
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