In October 2016, the Partition Museum opened in Amritsar , Punjab with the aim of delivering āa world class, physical museum, dedicated to the memory of the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947āits victims, its survivors and its lasting legacy.ā1 Claiming to be the first museum of its kind, the museum sits in Amritsarās Town Hall and is part of the cityās āHeritage Mileā linking the Town Hall to the Golden Temple. The museum contains a representation of a well to signify honour killings and suicide, and contains extracts of oral histories from a spectrum of witnesses ranging from significant players in the execution of Partition to ordinary refugees . Red and white are dominant colours through the exhibition space and several maps illustrate the borders and boundaries of the emergent nations. Alongside the 1947 Partition Archive, which collects oral histories from across South Asia on an online platform, the museum represents a significant step towards bringing memories of Partition into contact with the present and making them available to a broad public.2 Restoring and conserving memories of Partition, and housing and displaying them in a museum, frames such memories in the context of heritage and its management. The conservation of these memories becomes an act of restorative justice, although their caretaking by the state or institutions can complicate the way in which they can be used to interrogate the ongoing effects and legacies of Partition. Across Amritsar , new statues to Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the architect of the Indian constitution, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, have been erected alongside the augmentation of existing sites of commemoration, such as Jallianwala Bagh. Histories of nation, empire, decolonisation and violence have thus been simultaneously renovated in Amritsar , a kind of cacophony of memory inscribed in the built environment. Heritage can be understood as a practice of memory: a process whereby the past is selectively used for contemporary cultural and ideological imperatives, often to create national, ethnic, religious, or cultural belonging. Memory can be institutionalised, and through this process it can lose its vital character.
An example of this can be seen in the area surrounding the Partition Museum, which has undergone significant renovation, with pedestrianised walkways alongside the imposition of a standardised architectural style, more Jaipuri than Punjabi.3 As one commentator put it:
The facades of all buildings are blushing pink in Kota stone tiles and trellis screens and this includes the market places and shops selling the cityās famous āpappar-warhianā, Punjabi ājuttisā, religious artefacts and much more. It is disbelief for a moment that one is perhaps a trespasser into a cinema studio all painted and unreal waiting for directors to call the shots. Even shopkeepers look like some junior artistes who do not know how to play their part and what lines to say. The grimy Dharam Singh Market on the Golden Temple road has been turned into pretty pink, and right in front is a rectangular block on which life-size bhangra dancers, carved out of black marble, are jeering and striking poses. 4
Amritsarās markets already contained examples of intangible heritage from the region, all of which have significant histories, from the areas selling juttis (traditional shoes) to ornate metal work used in temples across northern India and local delicacies such as kulche (a type of fried bread). Pink plaster, marble and trellis have become ways of covering over, reorganising and displacing some of these shopkeepers, artisans and families, who have carried with them generations of skills and craft embodied in the objects, foods and services they provide. The simulacra represented above are modelled on a homogenous, more recognisably āIndianā, architecture which works to erase the authentic layered āgrimeā of the past.5 The levelling of the past in the face of the present and the formerās reanimation through a programme of heritage management represents how memories, history and the past can be recycled and refashioned by the present in a way that evacuates them of real or visceral connections to the past. Memory is not an inert archive to be organised and collected, nor is it something that can simply be recorded or restored. It is a dynamic process and sits in larger contexts that define, delineate and can ultimately limit its character.
Partition has been described as ānot a static event of the past, but an evolving moment in history.ā6 But the moment of Partition does not evolve in a straight line with clearly delineated cause and effect. Instead, it is marked fundamentally by moments of interruption and breakage (in both cause and effect), hiccups in time and unpredictable repercussions and impacts. The inability to come to terms with that past, and the repeated recurrence of sectarian violence since, may reflect, Tarun Saint has argued, the ābelated psychological after-effects of the rupture of Partition.ā7 In this way of thinking, Partition then is a set of events, but also a series of material and psychological effects that move forward (and some might even say backward, retrospectively) in time from the eventāBhaskar Sarkar argues that Partition functions across time, forward and backward, as an originary site of a larger history of violence; he thus includes 1905 in his Partition chronology.8 Indeed, one of the important recent observations of new scholarly work on Partition has been attention to the ālong Partitionā, which in the words of Vazira Zamindar is the unfinished āpost-colonial burden of this political Partitionā and a history that āunsettles ā¦ [the] national closure given to Partitionās displacements.ā9 The years 1971, 1984 and 2002 can thus be added to a list of dates which have their own specificity, but whose rupture opens a route into, and is often named as a repeat of, the past. Memory does not simply move forward or accrue more wisdom in its accumulation: it is a process anchored in the present, reaching into the past.
This edited collection attends to the locations of memory along and about the Indo-Pakistan and Indo-Bangladesh borders and the complex ways in which such memories are both allowed for and erased in the present. The collection is situated at the intersection of memory and commemoration in order to ask how memories have been formed and perpetuated across the imposition of these borders as kinds of intentional practice. This allows us to explore how national boundaries both silence memories and can be subverted in important ways, which we will address through a consideration of (a) physical sites and cultural practices on both sides of the IndiaāPakistanāBangladesh borders that gesture towards that which has been lostāthat is, the cultural whole that was (and as is shown here, still is) South Asia, and particularly the cultural regions of Punjab and Bengal , before Partition; (b) broader cultural āwholesā across South Asia, across religious and linguistic lines; alongside (c) forces that deny such connections. The chapters contained herein address issues of heritage and memory through specific case studies on present-day memorial, museological or commemorative and creative practices, through which sometimes competing memorial landscapes have been constructed and memories of past traumas and histories have become inscribed into diverse forms of cultural heritage (the built landscape , literature , film).
Memory has constituted a significant locus of work on Partition, exemplified by the field-defining work of Gyanendra Pandey , such as his 2001 Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India; Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin ās Borders and Boundaries: Women in Indiaās Partition from 1998; and Urvashi Butalia ās 1999 The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India.10 These works aimed to augment the (then typical) focus of scholarship on elite political perspectives on independence in the subcontinent with personal narratives by individuals who experienced Partition violence and its aftermath. Discussion of the history of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent up until that point had largely involved a process of disavowal, described by Gyanendra Pandey as ājustifying, or eliding, what is seen in the main as ā¦ an illegitimate outbreak of violence , and at making a case about how this goes against the fundamentals of Indian (or Pakistani) tradition and history: how it is, to that extent, not our history at all.ā11 Nationalist historical narratives then, in Alex Padamsee ās apt phrasing, āfled the scene for the onward progress of the newborn stateā (more appropriately, states).12 This non-history also recurs: Ritu Menon , Kamla Bhasin and Urvashi Butalia pointed out in ground-breaking articles in 1993 (and in larger bodies of work) that a then new accounting of the history of Partition was brought into being by the experience of anti-Sikh violence in Delhi in 1984, which made the Partition vividly present for a new generation of researchers. With such recurrence, according to Menon and Bhasin, āthe question of how such events are recorded, and by whom, returns to haunt us and acquires greater urgency with each subsequent episode.ā13 The emergence of this memory work thus emerged roughly in response to the 1984 violence against Sikhs in Delhi and other north Indian urban centres, and conjoined strikingly with the fiftieth anniversary of the Partition of the subcontinent, in 1997. The recurrence of Partition violence and the commemoration of it were thus marked within scholarly accounts, part of an ongoing understanding of Partition as an idea and experience marked by repetition and reiteration.
In the decade following...