LEST WE FORGET

Apart from invaluable eyewitness accounts, New Delhi’s Partition Museum also links the historic calamity with the city’s evolution

- Aditya Mani Jha

WHEN WE TALK ABOUT AN EVENT AS MOMENTOUS and tragic as the Partition of India (and the violence on both sides of the border), the stories therein aren’t restricted to words or even images. There are also physical objects inextricably linked to the event. A skilled curator, therefore, is tasked with sculpting a narrative around these objects—or rather, setting the stage for visitors to carve their own narratives out of this profusion of raw material. New Delhi’s recently opened Partition Museum, at Ambedkar University’s Dara Shikoh Library Building, succeeds in doing this, for the most part. This is the second such museum dedicated to the Partition of India—the first, set up by The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust (TACHT) in 2016, is in Amritsar. Kishwar Desai, the chairperson of TACHT, conceptualised both the Delhi and the Amritsar museums.

Delhi’s Partition Museum has been divided into six galleries—Towards Independence and Partition, Migration, Refuge, Rebuilding Home, Rebuilding Relationships and, finally, Hope and Courage.