Divided, We Stand

The museum is made up of more than 5,000 personal objects, mostly donated by survivors and their families. There is a copper vessel donated by SP Rawal from Delhi who was seven when his family left Pakistan, carrying this pot among other belongings. There is also a radio a family listened to, and the manuscript of a Partition memoir written in Urdu, which was never published. There are letters written by refugees at the time of Partition, most of them to the government, desperately seeking help to find missing relatives. One of them is from a father to his son, touchingly noting that they may not meet again. There is also an original refugee registration card from 1949. The central piece of the museum is a chainsaw installation signifying how everything was divided into two.

The team got in touch with these families individually and through writers, filmmakers and academics who had worked on the subject of the Partition. “We have the statistics but we don’t have the stories. Through this initiative, we aim to build a space where all these personal stories can be collated and recorded for posterity,” says Malika Ahluwalia, CEO of the Partition Museum, a Partition grandchild, who used to hear horror stories of migration from both sets of grandparents. “Even the figures we have are indicative. There was such unimaginable chaos that not everything could be reported. The effort is also to turn this place into an ultimate repository of information on the Partition,” she adds. There is also a room for survivors or their family to come and record their personal histories.

Set in five big rooms of the heritage Town Hall building, which used to be a kotwali, the first wing of the museum is an ode to the syncretic culture of the Punjab before Partition. The central installation here is of the five rivers that give the state its name. Another room is devoted to explaining, “Why Amritsar?” “Most refugees crossed over through Amritsar. On just one night in October 1947, half a million refugees crossed over to the other side through the Wagah border,” says Ahluwalia. The Wagah border is merely 15 minutes from the museum. Beyond that, it is a 30-minute drive to Lahore, a place many in Amritsar called home. The Town Hall building is the starting point of the newly built Heritage Corridor in the city, and the next stop is Jallianwala Bagh, the site of the 1919 massacre by General Dyre — where one can see bullet marks on the walls.

Ahluwalia, Kishwar Desai, Dipali Khanna and Bindu Manchanda — all affected by the Partition in some way — came together in 2015 to form The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust (TAACHT) and set up the Partition Museum. They also have a group of patrons, led by Kuldip Nayar, Lord Meghnad Desai and Prasoon Joshi, with Soni Razdan, Sunaina Anand and Ritu Kumar as trustees.

The museum had a soft launch in October last year, covering a much smaller space in the same 1870 Town Hall building. Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh will formally inaugurate the 17,000 sq ft museum on Thursday. Poet-lyricist Gulzar’s book Footprints on Zero Line: Writings on the Partition will be launched on the occasion; a musical performance by the Hashmat Sultana Sisters will also be held, and two panel discussions by Urvashi Butalia. The state has also announced August 17 as the Partition Remembrance Day.

TAACHT now plans to have sister museums in Delhi and Bengal. “We wanted a museum to come into existence before the last generation of survivors faded away. Since many of them are too old to travel to Amritsar, we plan to take the memories to their doorstep,” says Ahluwalia.

Desai, who is the museum’s Chief Trustee, is clear about their aim. “It is not merely to be the custodian of memories but also to educate people on the collateral loss in the aftermath of a tragedy that was not inevitable,” she says. “It is also about looking ahead with hope. Our last gallery is called the Gallery of Hope, and highlights how families rebuilt their lives. The Munjal family went on to start a small cycle business that became the Hero group,” says Desai.