Looking back in time: Amritsar's Partition museum will help us heal old wounds

Writer Kishwar Desai has put on hold her new work, a book on early Indian cinema. She says that what she is doing right now is more important. As the Chairperson of the Partition Museum, which has been granted space at the historic Town Hall building in Amritsar, she is excited. "Everything is finally taking shape," she says. It is important for her personally too. After all, while growing up, Partition was another family member. Always lurking somewhere in the shadows, its silence amplifying its presence.

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"Coming from a Partition family, I have heard stories where some people who disappeared were never talked about," says the 59-year-old writer who conceived the museum project in early 2015 with four people and now has nine members including art critic Alka Pande, Ritu Kumar, Anjolie Ela Menon, Barkha Dutt, Soni Razdan, Bela Sethi, Dipali Khanna, Bindu Manchanda, and Mallika Ahluwalia, on board.The museum will house documentaries, audiovisual presentations, installations, experimental art and facilitate workshops and lectures. "It will be technologically very advanced and all efforts will be made to ensure that the present generation can relate to it," says Desai who approached Delhi-based Amardeep Behl, the person behind designing Virasat-e-Khalsa in Anandpur Sahib, to give a physical form to the project at an approximate cost of Rs 10 crore, without any funding from the government.

Even as India gets set to celebrate its 70th anniversary of Independence, Desai thinks the time is just right to set up the museum. "There is enough distance between now and 1947, we can look back without any baggage. Historically, it is important for India and the world to have a permanent space where the stories and narratives of the 1947 tragedy are housed permanently.

Every mature society needs to look at the confrontation it has had, in order to learn, so as to evolve. Would we not be a very incomplete country if we talked only about our triumphs? Think,"asserts the author, who was inspired by the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg in South Africa and wants to pay back the debt to those who suffered the break up of the country. "That generation is fading away, as they are in their 80's and 90's. The place will keep their voices alive. Their tales intact.

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Of people who still have not forgotten the loss of their homes so many decades back," she adds. Talk to her about the fact that it was not just people on this side of the border that suffered, and she is quick to say, "We completely understand that. And that is precisely the reason that we are collaborating with intellectuals from across the border. People like Salima Hashmi and Jugnu Mohsin from Pakistan are on our team. Frankly, we would love to have a museum on similar lines in Lahore and in the UK. In fact, there would be lot of exchange programmes with Pakistan," says Desai, who is planning to visit Lahore soon to have meetings with historians and architects there. As the conversation veers towards museums in India looking haunted with number of visitors dropping every day, Desai says, "That is because we have dead objects and trophies to offer to the young in most of the museums. No effort is made to make things attractive and interactive.

Our museum in Amritsar will be a contemporary one, where history will be told through modern tools." Thankful to Punjab government for allotting the museum 16,000 square feet of space, she says this is not really the first time that there has been talk of a museum on Partition. Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and journalist Kuldip Nayar had discussed this idea way back in 1950 but it was too 'close' to the tragedy. "Did I tell you that the museum will also have oral histories and tales of romances that bloomed in refugee camps?" asks Desai.