existence of a form of community that was in fact under construction at the time (Pettigrew 1991, 37).
At about the same time, Sikhs began to speak of themselves as a qaum – a Persian word that can connote both “community” and “nation.” A few decades later, as British colonial rule drew to an end in India and plans for Partition were drawn up, there was talk for a brief while of dividing the territory into not just Hindumajority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan but also a Sikh-majority state called Sikhistan or Khalistan. However, this plan was only briefly considered by the British authorities and, faced with vociferous opposition from Indian politicians, it was discarded. Some years later, when Partition riots broke out and Sikhs were a large proportion of the millions killed or displaced, the lost opportunity for an independent Sikh homeland became one more chapter in the long history of Sikh suffering.
In the twentieth century, stories of Sikh martyrdom became the cornerstone of the community’s identity. They became a major theme of pedagogical books, pamphlets, Sikh newspapers, visual culture, as well as balladeering and storytelling traditions catering to Sikh audiences. By the middle of the twentieth century, this rhetoric of suffering and martyrdom had even become routinized; it was recalled in daily prayer but was removed from the everyday experience of the community which prospered in independent India. But in the late twentieth century, the tradition of “Sikh martyrdom” was reinfused with new meaning when the Khalistan movement erupted in Punjab.
In its time, the Khalistan movement – a violent movement for a separate Sikh state that gripped northern India through the 1980s and early 1990s – posed the “most serious crisis of political legitimacy” experienced by India after Independence (Jodhka 2001, 1311). In a pattern that was soon to become familiar, charismatic religious leaders stirred up their followers to avenge the community against real and imagined slights. Militants who started with a program of targeted assassinations soon graduated to random acts of terror. As violence escalated in Punjab, many innocent people were caught in its net, suffering from the actions of the terrorists and reactions of the Indian state. Eventually, in the summer of 1984, India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi ordered a military offensive against the militants headquartered in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhism’s most revered shrine. The army’s violent assault killed many militants, but it also killed hundreds of innocent pilgrims, and damaged sacred structures and precious relics. The attack on the Golden Temple traumatized the Sikh community and five months later it became the motivation for two of Indira Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards to assassinate her. The assassination was followed by widespread reprisal riots: for five days, mobs abetted by politicians from Mrs. Gandhi’s Congress party, in collusion with the police, looted and killed thousands of Sikhs. These events prompted a second and more severe wave of militant reaction which persisted until the early 1990s, when firm policing finally brought the movement to an end.
The Khalistan movement was sustained by the idea of the present as a repetition of a fabled past. The Sikh militants who roved Punjab through the 1980s saw themselves as martyrs reliving the persecutions suffered by their forebears in the eighteenth century.7 Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the preacher who was the force behind the first phase of the movement, would exhort his young followers to be ready to “be scalped, be broken on the wheel,” equating current police action with the historic tortures memorialized in Sikh prayer. And as Cynthia Mahmood (1996, 37) records, a former militant felt his sufferings united him with his heroes:
In our daily prayers we remember all our Sikh martyrs during the Mughal period, those who went through terrible hardships. They were cut to pieces, made to survive on a small loaf of bread, and they withstood all those tortures. I used to think … if the time came, would I be able to behave as those brave Sikhs, my ancestors, did? But finally when I went through it, it was not me but those other Sikhs who were sustaining that. It seemed they were taking the pain with me. (Mahmood 1996, 37)
When Badal, standing in Jerusalem, said, “The Sikhs too have suffered,” he may have had the longer history of Sikh martyrdom in mind. But given the Sikh martyrological imaginary, historical narratives of Mughal oppression would revive contemporary memories of the acts of the Indian state. Perhaps for this reason the project was controversial as soon as it was announced. If there were factions within Punjab who feared that a memorial to Sikh suffering would prevent the healing of wounds that were still raw, there were others who wanted the memorial to reignite passions that had just been tamped down. Yet others questioned the right of a government, constitutionally obliged to be secular, to spend enormous resources on a complex celebrating the history of the Sikh community, which after all constituted only 60 percent of the population of Punjab where there were also sizable numbers of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.
The many pushes and pulls eventually meant that the complex, initiated in 1999, did not open to the public until 2011. The long years of the project’s unfolding were to be tortuous, with waxing and waning political support, escalating costs, and perpetual lack of funds. But all this lay far ahead in the future, and in 1998 the project seemed to get off to a very brisk start.
A boat, a crescent, and a flower
A few months after Safdie and Badal met in Jerusalem, the architect visited Punjab. Touring the environs of Anandpur Sahib in a helicopter, Safdie rejected the plain ground that had been set aside for the museum, choosing instead a dramatic location on nearby sand cliffs. The museum would overlook the historic gurudwara where Guru Gobind Singh had baptized his followers, and its forms would both echo and play with the architecture of Sikh sacred structures. The designs that Safdie developed included a temporary exhibition hall, offices, and a seven-acre cascading water garden on the near side of the site. From the entrance plaza, a 540 foot long bridge would spring across a ravine to the museum proper, which would be housed in a cluster of structures ranged along the crest of the hill. These included an ellipsoid building shaped like a boat; a second building whose five towers joined to make a five-petalled flower-like roof (five being an auspicious number in Sikhism); and a third building whose sequence of square and triangular elements were arranged in a crescent (Figure 2.1). In profile, the buildings would recall the small forts built during Sikhism’s martial past; but the steel-clad roofs would be concave, as though revealing the inside of the domes that crown Sikh temples. According to Safdie, the complex’s buildings would express “the symbolic themes of earth and sky, mass and lightness, and depth and ascension (through the) … sandstone towers and reflective silver roofs” (Safdie Architects 2011).
Within months of the presentation of his design, Safdie was accused by the chief architect of the Punjab government of simply repeating the plans he had made for a museum in Wichita, Kansas. There, too, buildings with a similar thrusting skyline are arranged in a crescent, in a water body spanned by a bridge. Describing this accusation as “naive,” Safdie pointed out that he had used similar roof geometry not just in Anandpur Sahib and Wichita but also in Shenzhen and Singapore. This, he explained, was part of his personal architectural language.8
However, this accusation was not the only challenge Safdie was to face from architects in Punjab. Soon a prominent local architect persuaded the committee to insert his own memorial structure within Safdie’s complex. Intended as a quickly assembled feature that would be ready in time for the tercentenary celebrations the next year, this was to be a 300 foot tall steel alloy model of a Sikh ceremonial dagger that would be erected on a hill at the heart of the complex. Safdie reacted with dismay to this addition, which threatened to overwhelm his buildings. He reduced its size and shifted its location to the water gardens below. The local architect complained that Safdie had “buried” his feature, while Safdie countered that it now better harmonized with the complex and appeared to be “emerging out of the landscape.”9
FIGURE 2.1 Khalsa Heritage Complex, Anandpur Sahib. Architect Moshe Safdie. View of complex showing bridge, boat, and petal and crescent buildings from the water garden.
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