Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

the values of peace, tolerance, and egalitarianism that were the hallmarks of Sikhism’s earlier phase.

Thirteen years after Badal and Safdie had met in Jerusalem, the results of this process became apparent when the first phase of the museum opened to the public in November 2011. The galleries that have thus far opened occupy the Boat Building and the Flower Building, and tell the story of the lives of the 10 Sikh gurus. Visitors enter the museum at the upper level of the Boat Building and find themselves on a ramp that gently leads them down through the building to the ground level. As they descend, they pass by triple-height walls that are covered by an enormous hand-painted mural that is 75 feet high and 240 feet wide. Designed by a well-known graphic novelist, the mural’s interwoven scenes delineate a densely peopled Punjab landscape in affectionate and humorous detail. The mural’s scenes bring together medieval saints and modern migrants, trucks on roadways and cows in pasture, in a series of vignettes that borrow the language of Indian miniature painting. The timed walk through this gallery is animated by light and sound effects. As visitors enter, the gallery is suffused by deep blue light that gradually turns rosy pink, and then brilliantly bright, eventually fading into darkness once more. The changing illumination suggests both the diurnal cycle from dawn through noon to night as well as the annual cycle of the seasons of spring, summer, monsoon, and winter. The accompanying soundscape uses sounds of nature, instrumental music, and rousing folk songs. Together, sound and image in the gallery celebrate the landscape and lifeways of Punjab. Although there are specifically Sikh elements in the mural – scenes of village gurudwaras, Amritsar’s Golden Temple, and even the Khalsa Heritage Complex itself – the introductory gallery does not present Sikhism per se, but the culture of Punjab at large: as we see men and women laboring in fields and marketplaces, caring for families and celebrating festivals, we witness an inclusive narrative that embeds the Sikh community in a universal story of human beings living out their lives.

      In the galleries that follow, this broadening of the museum’s message continues, I believe, in a subliminal way, through the choices made in the visual idiom of the display. The lives and teachings of the Sikh gurus are described by an audio guide while visitors move through installations of hand-painted and digitally printed murals, textile hangings, sculptures, fiber optics, animation videos, multiscreen video projections, and immersive architectural environments. These exhibits weave the warp of their narratives with the weft of an exquisite aesthetic that derives its motifs primarily from Indian miniature paintings and Mughal architecture, and occasionally from modern and contemporary art (Figure 2.2).

      The visual language of the exhibits embeds the Khalsa Heritage Complex’s story of Sikhism within traditions that have been canonized as “mainstream” Indian civilization; the lyrical aesthetic of the exhibits makes them celebratory in their mode. Instead of the highly charged and ultimately divisive message that one might have expected of a Sikh history museum that was initially inspired by a museum dedicated to the Holocaust, we have here a narrative that places Sikh history within a celebration of Indian civilization; one that meshes with the “authorized heritage discourse” (Smith 2006) and the “official culture” of the Indian state.

      The first museum of Sikh history

      The full expression of Sikh suffering can be found instead in the Central Sikh Museum, the first museum of Sikh history to be established in India after Independence. This museum was opened in 1958 within the precincts of Sikhism’s most holy center, the Golden Temple Complex in Amritsar. It is run by the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), a powerful religious trust that regulates the practice of Sikhism within India. Belonging to a religious trust and located within a shrine, the SGPC’s Central Sikh Museum is a private Sikh organization, and is able to function very differently from a public museum sponsored by the state.

FIGURE 2.2 Interior of Khalsa Heritage Complex, showing galleries dedicated to the early gurus of Sikhism.

      Photo courtesy of A B Design Habit, New Delhi.

      The Central Sikh Museum was initially established to preserve and display the SGPC’s collection of rare relics, such as autograph texts by the Sikh gurus, and weapons, garments, and other articles of their use. In the 1960s the SGPC hired Sikh artists to produce a cycle of history paintings for the museum.¹¹ These large canvases depicted events from the gurus’ lives and elaborate battle scenes as well the horrendous punishments borne by the eighteenth-century Sikh martyrs. We see Baba Dip Singh’s head being sliced off by a sword and a fountain of blood spurting from his neck; Bhai Mati Das being sawn down the middle; Sikh mothers witnessing their babies slaughtered in a Herodian massacre. In turn, this cycle of paintings provides the visual vocabulary that now circulates in popular prints and books on the theme of Sikh martyrdom.

FIGURE 2.3 Central Sikh Museum, Amritsar. Visitors view paintings showing eighteenth-century martyrs.

      Photo: Brinda Kumar © Kavita Singh and Saloni Mathur.

      Over the years, hundreds of other images of Sikh heroes and martyrs have accumulated in the Central Sikh Museum. The individuals memorialized on the museum’s walls include prominent religious figures, social workers and reformers, scholars and litterateurs, sportsmen and soldiers. They also include victims of the anti-Sikh riots in 1984, Khalistani terrorists from the 1980s and 1990s, and the controversial preacher Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.¹² Portraits of the two assassins of Indira Gandhi also find a place on these walls. Honoring men who are condemned elsewhere, since the end of the troubled 1980s this museum has become a shrine to the memory of Khalistan (Figure 2.3).

      Sikh martyrs, Sikh victims

In the Central Sikh Museum we see perhaps the alter ego of the Khalsa Heritage Complex: as the ur-museum of Sikh suffering, it could have served as the template for the latter museum, but was explicitly rejected by it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that the Khalsa Heritage Complex would take the path it did, veering away from the moorings of the holocaust paradigm, and toward the pronouncements of interfaith harmony. While the Central Sikh Museum is a private institution, the Khalsa Heritage Complex is a public institution funded by the state. And when the state invests in an institution dedicated to one religious community in a complex multicultural democracy like India, it cannot afford to tell a story of anything but harmony – whatever the facts may be.

      But the differences in the narratives of the two museums are not simply a result of the limits and possibilities of private versus public institutions; I believe it is also a question of displays in sacred spaces versus those in secular ones. The Central Sikh Museum tells its tale within a temple, a place of pilgrimage. The Khalsa Heritage Complex was always intended as a state institution, situated near but not in a temple. What happens when a tale of suffering is retold not in a temple but in a museum? Perhaps the story takes on a different meaning, and a more dangerous one. Without the aura of a religious setting, the dead are reduced: from martyrs, they become merely victims. What is the difference between a martyr and a victim? And what are the consequences of narrating the same violent history as a martyrology or as a victimology? However highly charged the story of a martyr may be, it is a narrative that is complete. Martyrs are glorious: for all their sufferings on earth, they have claimed their reward in heaven. But what of the other dead who are only victims, only men who died on earth? Their stories end abruptly, and they call on us to complete their tales by avenging them in the here and now. It is through this difference that the memory of martyrs can be neutral but the remembrance of victims is not: through them the present can be ruptured by the past.

Exile Tibet

      The museum of the Museum on the Roof of the World

      Your bus to Dharamsala races along State Highway 22 when suddenly on your right you see some striking architectural forms: you are driving past the Khalsa Heritage Complex. In a flash