In a rapidly changing world and with the experience of the pandemic not quite behind us, we all yearn for a better time, for a ‘normalcy’ that seems to have disappeared from the world. This longing for a time before the pandemic, even for a world that was not as precarious as it seems, can be seen as a kind of nostalgia. Nostalgia leads to the making of stories that make an earlier time more glorious than the present, whether this involves individual memory, family narratives, or the myths that nations construct about themselves. In the case of nations, national myths have been housed in museums dedicated to newly-formed countries, especially in the postcolonial world. Pointing this out in her article, The Museum is National, art historian Kavita Singh reads the construction of a narrative of national greatness in the National Museum in New Delhi in the way that sculptural traditions of the subcontinent were read as different from European art.
Past Imperfect: Memories Frozen In Time
From Partition to genocides in Rwanda and elsewhere, museums are important to understanding our fractured past.
Museums have traditionally been seen as institutions that preserve, enshrine, and glorify ancient histories and hoary traditions. However, the role of the museum has undergone a transformation as we reckon with past and recent histories of war, genocide, slavery, and dispossession of indigenous people in different parts of the world. Instead of reverence and high art, museums can be places that encourage debate and an acknowledgement of multiple axes along which material culture, historical narratives, and representation can be understood. Saloni Mathur argues for a kind of “churning of the museological status quo” in which every aspect of the museum, from its funding sources to the complicated histories depicted in them, are being debated today. The museum may now be seen as a place where ‘difficult knowledge’ can be debated, as the title of a collection by Erica Lehrer et al. announces.
The category of memorials that are also museums have been particularly controversial in the last few years. The recent updates to the Jallianwala Bagh memorial raised interesting questions about how changes and updates to a historical memorial is viewed by those who have a deep emotional relationship with it. Given that it was the site of one of the greatest atrocities committed by the colonial government, its beautification was received by many with dismay. The addition of murals and sculptures and the covering of the well into which many threw themselves on that fateful day when Colonel Dyer ordered that they be fired upon has been read as insensitive, a ‘Disneyfication’ of the memorial.
Jallianwala Bagh memorial
Other memorial museums, for instance, the Kigali Genocide Museum in Rwanda and the Toul Sleng Museum of the Crimes of Genocide in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, have grappled with similar questions. Amy Sodaro points out that “more than a museum or a memorial, memorial museums work both to commemorate and educate, as well as document and preserve the past, collect survivor testimony and details about victims, influence national and international policy to prevent genocide and rights abuses, and, ultimately, foster democratic culture”. Acts of preservation in these cases are less about nostalgia than about keeping alive the knowledge of the original event so that its horror can be understood.
How then should we tackle our desire to look back at our past and cast it in a golden glow of perfection that contrasts with the realities of the present? This question haunts any representation of that original tragedy of the Indian subcontinent, the partition of 1947, in which over a million people lost their lives. A majority of representations of the partition, especially survivor stories, have tended to emphasise the harmonious relationship between communities prior to the catastrophe. This is its own kind of mythmaking, though it is true that killing of the scale seen in Calcutta in 1946 and Punjab in 1947 had not happened before, and a certain kind of co-existence between Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims has been much celebrated. Another theme that emerges from Partition stories is the love for homes, communities, ways of life, friendships, and social worlds that disappeared overnight as migrants fled to the opposite side of new borders in the East and West.
Commemoration of genocide in Rwanda
Two new museums dedicated to the Indian partition directed and led by Kishwar Desai and a team of activists, scholars, and citizens—one inaugurated in 2017 in Amritsar and the other scheduled to open next January—are the first such attempts to explore partition memory in an institutional context. On my first visit to the museum, the song Rang de Basanti Chola from the 1965 film Shaheed was playing on the public sound system. It heralded the nationalist framing of the first few exhibits that tell the story of Independence before proceeding to the historical background to Partition and then to individual stories and testimonies. On my second visit to the museum, too, I wondered how we might approach the story of Partition leaving aside the nationalist lens. Partition was a transnational tragedy for those who lost families and homes. Is there a way to move beyond nationalist nostalgia and pre-Partition nostalgia to tell this story? A deep historical analysis of the event at the level of region, city, locality would be incredibly educative for young people today. We need not abandon our interest in nostalgia but could treat it as the beginning of an inquiry, rather than its end point.
Writing about nostalgia in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, Svetlana Boym identifies two kinds of nostalgia—‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’. If the first ‘evokes national past and future’, the second kind can reveal that ‘longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another’. It is this second kind of nostalgia that is incredibly important in the world of museums today, and, I would argue for our representation of the partition. We need to ask difficult questions about how we ‘other’ communities, religions, caste groups, social identities and how this othering has given us our own sense of self. We need to confront the fact that the division of India was also about Muslim political self-realisation. An acknowledgment of our collective responsibility for the carnage of the partition followed by a reinvention of identities that are built on new solidarities with members of other communities, nations, groups is imperative to making a truly multicultural and egalitarian society.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Our Past In The Present")
ALSO READ