the course of this chapter, we have examined two museums in India that were inspired by Yad Vashem, though the Holocaust museum paradigm traveled to Anandpur Sahib and to Dharamsala along very different routes. That both Sikhs and Tibetans would wish to model their museums on Yad Vashem shows how Jewish memorial practices offer a template for other groups to commemorate historical suffering of their own. But a template cannot be mechanically applied to simply reproduce the original in a new place. As each community set about making its own museum for its own holocaust, it has had to reckon with local histories and local politics that have weighed on the consequences of remembering.
When we compare the trajectories taken by the Tibetan and Sikh projects, an irony comes to the fore. The Sikh community has made martyrdom the cornerstone of its identity, but the museum that set out to commemorate their trauma was turned into a joyous celebration of Sikh integration with India instead of recounting Sikh suffering at Indian hands. On the other hand, the Tibetan exile community, which has suffered terrible persecution and homelessness in the past six decades, has chosen not to make the memorialization of its sad history central to its self-representation. Yet it is the Tibetans who have been able to make a trauma museum for themselves. Why was the Tibetan project possible to achieve, and why did the Sikh claim to traumatic history have to be transmogrified?
Part of the answer may lie in the way these two communities present their relationship to the otherworldly and the thisworldly, to religion and realpolitik. The Tibetan self-presentation as an otherworldly, spiritual people makes them appear unthreatening; as long as this aspect predominates they are allowed a small enclave of political memory that will hardly affect the fragile balance between India and China. But the Sikh community, although defined by faith, is robustly political in its demands. Claiming victimhood rather than martyrdom, the consequences of their memorialization are too dangerous for India to bear. Tibetan dreams of freedom do not disturb the contours of the Indian map, while the Sikhs’ demand for Khalistan threatened to tear it apart.
There is a lesson to be learned here about the relationship between memorialization and national self-definition. Fifty or sixty years ago, we used art museums to consolidate national identity by inviting the citizenry to collectively “own” the great cultural tradition that had been put on display. More recently, the museum of trauma has emerged as a new kind of national museum. The suffering that the people have endured becomes another kind of heritage: a shared experience that binds members of the populace to each other, even as it augurs their transition into a new phase that will be more just, and more safe, than the one that has gone before. Thus the many museums of trauma that are also sites for the foundational narratives of new nations or reinvented ones: in postapartheid South Africa, in postcommunist eastern Europe, in post-Liberation Bangladesh.
Both the Khalsa Heritage Complex and the Tibet Museum are also dedicated to nations; but the nations they gesture toward, Khalistan and Tibet, are political aspirations that have not become political facts. One museum memorializes a separatist movement that failed; the other mourns for a land that is occupied. Both institutions are haunted by the ghosts of nations whose existence – if it ever comes about – lies far in the future.
Acknowledgments
I gratefully acknowledge the work of Tulay Atak, Hope Childers, and Brinda Kumar, who conducted field work in Anandpur Sahib, Dharamsala, and Amritsar as part of Museology and the Colony, a three-year collaborative project awarded by the Getty Foundation museums to Saloni Mathur and myself. I also thank Imogen Clark and Latika Gupta for their photographs. I received much from many people as I researched this paper, but am particularly grateful to Clare Harris and Michael Ginguld.
Notes
1 1 In this chapter, I use “Holocaust museum” to signify institutions that memorialize the Jewish genocide under the Nazi regime, and “holocaust museum” to signify similar museums that narrate genocides and massacres of diverse communities.
2 2 Prominent professional associations for such museums include the International Coalition for the Sites of Conscience and the ICOM Committee for Memorial Museums in Remembrance of the Victims of Public Crimes. Many museum design consultants who worked on the pioneering Holocaust museums in the United States and Israel have had subsequent careers designing such museums for other communities. Prominent among these are Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the largest museum design firm in the world, whose projects include the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, the Holocaust Museum in Houston, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, and the Vietnam Era Education Center in Washington, DC. Michael Berenbaum, who was director of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, has been involved in the Holocaust Center in Skopje, Macedonia, the Holocaust Museum in Illinois, and Memoria y Tolerencia, Mexico. Jeshajahu Weinberg, whose museum work in Israel led to his appointment as Director of the United States Holocaust Museum, was also involved in Jewish museum projects in Warsaw and Berlin and was a consultant on the Khalsa Heritage project discussed in this chapter. Professional networks of prominent designers, architects, and museum content creators who work internationally have given the holocaust museum a recognizable appearance and narrative structure as it spreads across the globe.
3 3 An instructive study of this in relation to the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC is presented in Linenthal (1995). See also Young’s (1993) study of Holocaust memorials across Europe, Israel, and North America.
4 4 Even more cynically, one might say that the establishment of memorial museums has become a useful political ritual for regimes which need to signal the end of one era (an era of oppression) and the arrival of another era (an era of recuperation) through the making of such a museum. Since the very act of memorializing suggests the pastness of the things memorialized, a museum project of this type can even be used to suggest the historical distance from an era or power structure which in fact continues to endure in the present day. In Cambodia, for instance, memorials went up at many sites of internment and mass killings, even as former Khmer Rouge officials remained powerful in the new Cambodian government. Closer to home, in India victims of the toxic gas leak from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal – said to be the worst industrial disaster in history – received pitifully inadequate compensation while Union Carbide’s managers went free; in an ill-advised gesture of “closure,” Union Carbide offered to fund a memorial. As Bhopal’s survivors continue to struggle against unfeeling authorities and their own compromised health, they have rejected the offer of this memorial from above in favor of a more modest exhibition of their own devising which will be part of their advocacy for justice (see Lakshmi 2012).
5 5 Fenech (2000). For a fuller history of the Singh Sabha movement, see Oberoi (1994, chs. 4–6).
6 6 Indeed, the Singh Sabha even constituted a category of “living martyrs” for people who “gave” their lives not by dying but by selflessly devoting themselves to community service. See Fenech (2000, 14–15) for a discussion of the zinda shahid, or living martyr who faces persecution as he pursues his goal. As an example of such a shahid, Fenech discusses the life of Bhai Takht Singh (1860–1933) who pioneered the cause of Sikh female education.
7 7 For an analysis of Sikh militant discourse which produced parallelisms between the political present and the historical past, see Das (1992).
8 8 Letter to Vini Mahajan, Chief Executive Officer, Anandpur Sahib Foundation, January 26, 1999.
9 9 Minutes of the Meeting held under the Chairmanship of Chief Minister of Punjab in regard to Presentation of the Model of KHMC, August 7, 1998.
10 10 Moshe Safdie, fax to D. S. Jaspal, November 14, 1997, Anandpur Sahib Foundation, File: Correspondence with Moshe Safdie.
11 11 For brief account of the most prolific of these artists, Kripal Singh, see Randhawa (1978–1979).
