The Partition Museum is part of Amritsar’s old town hall, a British era structure built a little more than half a kilometer away from the Golden Temple. It had been in our bucket list ever since work started about six years ago. In the five years since it opened it has quietly become one of the must-do places in town. The concierge at our hotel chatted with us as we waited to check in. “What do you plan to visit?” he asked. The Family reeled off the three obvious anwers, “The Golden Temple, Jallianwala Bagh, the Wagah border post.” “Don’t forget the Partition Museum,” the Sikh concierge suggested. Perhaps his family is one of the many in which the grandparents still tell you that Amritsar is one half of the twin cities of Lahore and Amritsar, their axis precisely bisected by Wagah.
We asked Anil to drop us a few hundred meters from the Museum and walked the short distance, past a statue of Ranjit Singh, through the ceremonial archway of the Town Hall, and into the forecourt. No mistakes. Signs told us that we were at the right place. There were no queues at the ticket counter, but there were many people inside. We found that those who choose to come here spend a long time on the exhibits, lingering, reading, listening to audio clips, watching oral history on video. It is put together with great thought and definitely worth a visit if you want to put the Golden Temple, Wagah, Jallianwala Bagh, and the wonderful food of Amritsar in its historical context.
A section of the exhibits deals with the musical tradition of Gurudwaras, and the role that muslim musicians, rubabis, played since the time of Bhai Mardana, Guru Nanak’s rubabi. This tradition has withered: atrophied in Pakistan as Sikhs were persecuted by the state, and in India from the migration of musicians to Pakistan. The syncretic nature of early Sikhism meant that there was a whole stream of what we now call Sufi music which became accultured to Sikhism. There were record albums on display, some of the music available on audio. I examined them; perhaps one can find more of the music on YouTube or personal collections.
Pigeons perched on an unnamed warrior’s upheld sword outside the Museum. When the Aga Khan met the Viceroy, Lord Minto, in 1906 and pleaded with him, successfully, for a separate political future for muslims in the country, he released a demon. Netflix has a short documentary on Abdus Salam, the Nobel Prize winning expatriate Pakistani. The persecution of his sect, the Ahmadiyas, deemed heretics in his country, forms a recurrent theme in the documentary. As I watched it I realized again that a country based on religion quickly embraces the most dogmatic forms, purging repeatedly those people who do not conform exactly to the central dogma. Ironically, the Aga Khanis are also persecuted in Pakistan today. I’m more simpatico with the lawyer, Ambdekar, whose statue stands in the circle outside the musuem, because he was one of those who argued for a universal and common electorate in the Constituent Assembly after Independence.
Don't hold your breath 