‘East Punjab must not lag behind’: Partition, museums, and identity in independent India

Abstract

This article foregrounds the postcolonial museum as a new source, and site, from which to write South Asian histories of partition and its aftermath. It focuses on collecting practices in India within East Punjab, following the partition of the British-era Punjab province in 1947 between India and Pakistan. Tapping hitherto-unused archival sources, it reveals the considerable financial investment and drive to collect at this time, belying the idea of museums being ‘dead’ colonial assets, and demonstrates their centrality to how citizenship and belonging were articulated (or withheld) in independent India. Some discoveries have far-reaching implications for both historians and museum professionals. The article also shines a light upon a new range of actors—both named and nameless, professional and citizen—who have been marginal to historical enquiry thus far. Moving beyond the familiar colonial templates within which museums in the region have until now been studied, it asks critical questions of the postcolonial museum in South Asia by interrogating the relationship between collections, and the Indian nation-state and its subsidiaries.