Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

roof (five being an auspicious number in Sikhism); and a third building whose sequence of square and triangular elements were arranged in a crescent (Figure 2.1). In profile, the buildings would recall the small forts built during Sikhism’s martial past; but the steel-clad roofs would be concave, as though revealing the inside of the domes that crown Sikh temples. According to Safdie, the complex’s buildings would express “the symbolic themes of earth and sky, mass and lightness, and depth and ascension (through the) … sandstone towers and reflective silver roofs” (Safdie Architects 2011).

      Within months of the presentation of his design, Safdie was accused by the chief architect of the Punjab government of simply repeating the plans he had made for a museum in Wichita, Kansas. There, too, buildings with a similar thrusting skyline are arranged in a crescent, in a water body spanned by a bridge. Describing this accusation as “naive,” Safdie pointed out that he had used similar roof geometry not just in Anandpur Sahib and Wichita but also in Shenzhen and Singapore. This, he explained, was part of his personal architectural language.⁸

      However, this accusation was not the only challenge Safdie was to face from architects in Punjab. Soon a prominent local architect persuaded the committee to insert his own memorial structure within Safdie’s complex. Intended as a quickly assembled feature that would be ready in time for the tercentenary celebrations the next year, this was to be a 300 foot tall steel alloy model of a Sikh ceremonial dagger that would be erected on a hill at the heart of the complex. Safdie reacted with dismay to this addition, which threatened to overwhelm his buildings. He reduced its size and shifted its location to the water gardens below. The local architect complained that Safdie had “buried” his feature, while Safdie countered that it now better harmonized with the complex and appeared to be “emerging out of the landscape.”⁹

FIGURE 2.1 Khalsa Heritage Complex, Anandpur Sahib. Architect Moshe Safdie. View of complex showing bridge, boat, and petal and crescent buildings from the water garden.

      Photo: Shailan Parker.

      We may interpret these controversies as expressions of the rivalries and resentments that can arise in any place when a prominent project is given to an outsider architect. But we may also see them as the manifestation of the irritations that arise between a global cultural form and its local context of reception. Since Badal had initiated the project by asking for a museum “just like this,” Safdie could justifiably assume that Punjab desired a “signature” building by him. As “starchitecture,” an important function of the building would be its ability to signal that it had indeed been designed by a famous starchitect. But in poorer countries, which have long been exploited by wealthy ones, suspicion is a habit. This might explain the objections of the first architect, who felt that Safdie was only recycling a previous project for India, much as charities distribute secondhand clothes in the “third world.” The second architect’s attempted introjection into Safdie’s complex could be seen as a refusal to accept starchitecture as privileged authorial form, immune to local interventions. Indeed, when arguing his case, the architect of the monumental dagger insisted on the value of local knowledge which alone could produce structures that would speak to the Sikh community.

Despite the occasional contention about the nature of the architecture, however, and despite erratic funding which resulted in tremendous delays, the building project was doggedly pursued. As the years went by, and the project fell nearly a decade behind schedule, the slowly rising buildings remained the only visible sign of the ambitious plans announced so long ago by the government to mark the tercentenary. Featured in newspaper articles (which mostly reported controversies, including many financial scandals and staff appointments and resignations) and on countless blogs (which mostly looked forward to the project’s completion), the architecture of the Khalsa Heritage Complex was always visible in the public domain. But the debates about its content were conducted in the privacy of committee rooms, studios, and offices, and remained hidden from view.

      Inside: A tale of two Sikhisms

      Since the Khalsa Heritage Complex was a brand new project, and existing museums would be unlikely to part with historic objects from their collections for its sake, assembling the museum’s display presented a challenge. For this reason the Khalsa Heritage Complex was conceived as a storytelling museum which would use reproductions and audiovisual technology to deliver a message, rather than as a history or art museum that would need to display valuable original relics or artifacts.

      At its inception, Safdie recommended that exhibit development be overseen by Jeshajahu Weinberg, the founding director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. As Safdie explained, Weinberg’s experience of working with cutting-edge displays in multiple media would “be helpful in pulling together the program, briefs, and story lines into an exhibit script.”¹⁰ With architecture designed by Safdie, and storylines to be developed by Weinberg, the project seemed poised to take advantage of Holocaust museum expertise to develop a similar narration of the Sikh experience. The elegiac mode of the planned museum was also signaled by the name chosen for it: Khalsa Heritage Memorial Museum.

      Although Weinberg was appointed as a consultant, the Punjab government also set up a committee of local scholars, religious advisers, and museologists to work out a broad plan for the museum. And this is where the blueprint of the Holocaust museum began to fray at the edges. The committee began by questioning the very name of the complex. Memorials were made for things that belonged in the past. The Khalsa was a flourishing community, so what sense did it make to call this a memorial, they asked. Accordingly, the project was renamed the Khalsa Heritage Complex, immediately suggesting a celebration of culture rather than the memorialization of a vexed history.

The premise on which the narrative was to be developed was also called into question. B. N. Goswamy, an eminent art historian who was part of the committee, recalled a preliminary briefing in which he was told that the museum would relate the unique story of Sikh suffering. “Every community has suffered,” he observed: “This is not the special prerogative of the Sikhs” (pers. comm. 2000). Indeed, through the years of Sikh militancy in Punjab, Hindus were often the targets of its violence; as a prominent Hindu figure in Panjab University, Goswamy himself had received death threats from Sikh terrorists. A one-sided victimology of Sikhs could hardly pass muster in a content committee whose members represented a wide range of backgrounds and interests. This committee soon produced a document that spelled out the major themes and principles to be followed in the museum. The 13 topics were universality; equality; freedom of conscience; social justice; heroism and martyrdom; high spirits; love; service and sacrifice; goal of life; harmony with nature; man as custodian of life on the planet; dignity, selfrespect and honor; and ecumenism. The martial history of the Sikhs and their record of martyrdom were reduced to a single topic among many others.

      The exhibition design was awarded to the National Institute of Design’s Department for Exhibition Design rather than being handed over to a foreign consultant. Even after the attenuation of the theme of Sikh suffering in the project brief, however, the exhibition designers whom I interviewed recalled that the emphasis on martyrdom persisted in the institutional plans. On seeing the allocation of floor space to the various galleries, Ambrish Arora, a designer who worked on the project, recalled: “There was a section for the gurus, but the section on martyrdom was huge” (interview, 2011). The head of the design team, Amar Behl, noted that a very large proportion of the galleries on the Gurus was devoted to the tenth guru, Guru Gobind Singh, whose bloody clashes with the imperial authorities led to the deaths of countless followers and all his sons. In comparison, very little space was set aside for Guru Nanak, the peaceable founder of the faith. “Where is my Baba Nanak, I asked? What happens to his message? I reversed the ratio of the galleries,” Behl says; “I reduced the space for Guru Gobind and I increased the space for Guru Nanak” (interview, 2006).

      Clearly, through the long processes of consultation, research, and design, the narrative of the Khalsa Heritage Complex moved away from the martyrological mode. Rather than focusing on the history of martial valor and narratives of suffering and martyrdom – associated with the latter