Description
Even by the standards of the violent 20th century, the Partition is remembered for the violence it unleashed on the subcontinent. Yet it took nearly 70 years for it to be museumised in the form of the Partition Museum located in Amritsar, India. In its framing of a divisive yet international history of the Partition, how has Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League been framed? This paper argues that the Museum suggests that Pakistan came into being as a result of Jinnah and the League’s perseverance and intentions. The story is almost totally centred around them and is constantly framed in opposition to the Congress. In a sharp contradiction to its declared objectives, the people are crucially absent in its display of what led to the Partition. It keeps its focus on events deemed to be ‘significant’, at the expense of the narratives of the subaltern – the ordinary people and their lives, which is contradictory to its declared philosophy of a being people’s museum. Secondly, it frames and explains the creation of Partition in an 'intentionalist' fashion. The paper argues that the Museum fails in locating the politics of the subaltern within the fold of ‘high politics’.
