Civilizing East Punjab

So wrote B. C. Mitra, former Gallery Assistant of the Central Museum Lahore, and Officer on Special Duty with the responsibility for packing up East Punjab’s share from the Lahore Museum in 1948. Mitra felt the reasons were so obvious that he could ‘refrain from expatiating on the need for’ a museum in East Punjab and he moved on to discussing potential sources that could ‘yield a collection of a fairly respectable size at a surprisingly low cost’.Footnote ²⁶ East Punjab’s urgent need for civilizational credentials (according to Mitra) is all the more telling because of the context in which his argument was made: the international bad press that both India and Pakistan received (the Punjab in particular) as a result of the violence which accompanied partition. A desire to redress it by acquiring evidence of culture and putting it on display may well be what drove many of the actors in this story, without their always being aware of it.

For the museum he hoped to build, Mitra identified two kinds of sources: first, those of government (such as acquisitions under the Treasure Trove Act of 1878;Footnote ²⁷ reciprocal exchanges and surplus distribution of coins and other objects between government museums; free copies of government publications); and second, private sources that could be gifted or loaned.Footnote ²⁸ At this early stage, government sources also included East Punjab’s share of collections from Lahore, derived from the Museum as well as the Central Record Office, all of which reached Amritsar by the end of 1949. But as we shall see, although contested and coveted in equal measure, as was the case with all the ‘assets’ divided at partition,Footnote ²⁹ these collections were by no means the only, or even key, source of East Punjab’s historical treasures. By May 1950, East Punjab appointed the Keeper of Government Records, Dr G. L. Chopra, as Curator of the Museum too, paving the way for amalgamating the two institutions under the Historical Records Office at Shimla.Footnote ³⁰

That B. C. Mitra articulated a need for tangible remnants of a past heritage and the legitimacy offered by museums is one thing—he was, after all, tasked with recovering East Punjab’s share of the Lahore Museum collection. But that others did so too, in the midst of the trauma of partition, is notable. Even more remarkable is the fact that it stayed on the agenda of local government, despite the enormous strain it was under to maintain law and order, effect partition, resolve innumerable related disputes, and address refugee requirements.Footnote ³¹ The mechanics of how this was accomplished, and their implications for East Punjab, and for South Asia, are explored in what follows.

Collecting for East Punjab

On 5 January 1949, Dr G. L. Chopra (then still the Keeper of Records), received two wire communications. The first was from Amritsar, with instructions to postpone his impending visit to Lahore, scheduled to collect East Punjab’s share of documents from the Central Record Office.Footnote ³² The second was from the Deputy Commissioner of Jullunder ‘saying that orders for transferance of a large collection of a muslim evacuee to this office have been issued [sic]’.Footnote ³³ He also received news from the Under Secretary (Rehabilitation) about orders ‘for transfer to this office of still another collection of a muslim evacuee from Jullundur district’.Footnote ³⁴ In consequence, Dr Chopra made speedy arrangements to ‘attend to all these matters’.Footnote ³⁵

How and why was this property being transferred to the Record Office? Pakistan and India—West and East Punjab—had both established offices to take custody of evacuee property in September 1947. The original idea was that the Office would hold evacuee property in trust so it could be reclaimed by its owners. The arrangement reflected official recognition that many people might have temporarily moved to safe locations during the rioting that accompanied partition, rather than with the intention to permanently migrate to the ‘other’ Dominion. But as scholars have shown, it rapidly morphed into an institution—and subsequently a law—that served to dispossess the very people whose interests it was meant to protect,Footnote ³⁶ in addition to bystanders such as overseas Indian Muslims with property in IndiaFootnote ³⁷ or parts of India that had nothing to do with partition but were drawn into its slipstream.Footnote ³⁸ This assessment remains valid, notwithstanding further scholarship that has uncovered regional variations in the motives behind such legislation, or the local factors that may have been at play.Footnote ³⁹

By the time Chopra received his instructions in January 1949, both East and West Punjab had, in competition, enacted amendments to the original legislation. While ‘technically’ permitting the return of property (whose definition and scope had also been expanded to include ‘cash deposits and the contents of bank lockers’ in East Punjab, among other things) to the original owners, in practice it became ‘increasingly circumspect’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Meanwhile, evacuee property legislation was extended from the ‘disturbed’ areas affected by partition to other ‘troublesome’ areas like Hyderabad. The Evacuee Property Ordinance promulgated on 18 October 1949 was a step up from previous legislation in terms of its geographic and legislative scope. It ‘effectively nationalised, at a stroke, all property vacated by Muslims in India, outside Bengal, Assam and the north eastern states’ and authorized the use of such property for refugee rehabilitation or other ‘public purposes’.Footnote ⁴¹ Requiring only the slightest evidence of a person ‘intending’ to migrate in order to attach their property, it had far-reaching ramifications, providing the means and the precedent for the state to make a direct intervention into its citizens’ homes and, over time, shaping ‘the Indian state’s more quotidian engagements’.Footnote ⁴²

The irony of the Office of the Custodian acquiring and dispersing property that it was, in fact, established to protect is now recognized. What has escaped historical scrutiny, so far, is the nature of some of the property the Office handled. Thus far, scholarly work in the burgeoning field of evacuee property literature has dealt with immovable property in the main. But as much as property and land were a ‘cornerstone of refugee rehabilitation and…[creating] the new post-partition order’,Footnote ⁴³ it emerges that movable evacuee property was no less important.Footnote ⁴⁴ Moreover, it emerges that the movable property worth having was not constituted only of cash assets, jewellery, or raw materials and other saleable items (the typical list that appears in diplomatic or legislative correspondence),Footnote ⁴⁵ but also objects of cultural value. They provided the foundation on which to rebuild Punjab through cultural rehabilitation; to give it identity and a sense of history rooted in objects, even if places and territories were no longer accessible.

This was a large-scale operation. Evacuee property was, without shame or hesitation, classed as ‘government property’ in the Record Office’s list of sources. That the East Punjab government was classifying the movable property of Muslim migrants as a government source as early as 1948 is extraordinary. Punjab’s Historical Records Office began to acquire it even before East Punjab’s share of records were collected from Lahore.Footnote ⁴⁶ Within a month, Chopra recorded that the Additional Custodian of Evacuee Property, Jullundur, had written of ‘a large quantity of historical matter [books and manuscripts]…lying at’ Karnal, Kunjpura, and Panipat. Chopra’s office was asked to examine it ‘with a view to bringing a portion of it which might be suitable’ and eliminating ‘on the spot’ those portions deemed irrelevant to the Archives.Footnote ⁴⁷ By the end of 1949, his office had inspected ‘property at Jullundur, Karnal, Panipat, Rewari, Gurgaon, Amritsar, Ambala, Rohtak and Simla’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The East Punjab government had not waited for, or needed, the sweeping powers of the Evacuee Property Ordinance of October 1949. By then, it had already decided—and what is more, implemented—a policy to appropriate evacuee art for ‘public purposes’. But it is a revelation that these purposes went beyond the ‘recovery of the “economic life” in the province’,Footnote ⁴⁹ to encompass the recovery of its historical roots and thus identity.

The rapaciousness of the move is startling. So is the discovery that the East Punjab government considered the consolidation of historical material as important as managing the refugee crisis, which was known to be placing enormous strain on the province’s personnel and infrastructure.Footnote ⁵⁰ The desire for a deep-rooted and tangible past encompassing objects and records was critical enough to preoccupy both the minds and machinery of government. Historians of modern South Asia have not previously noted this drive, nor probed its manifestations.

Chopra’s hectic inspections were a direct result of the Custodian issuing a notice on 5 February 1949 requiring all his subordinates, down to the district level, to report on historical material within their remit in two weeks:

The instructions leave no room for ambiguity. This was a government-sponsored project, and if further proof were needed, consider the title of the file in which the letter quoted above is archived: ‘Salvaging Objects of Historical Interest from the Belongings of Muslim Evacuees Through out [sic] the Punjab’. It is also evident that at least the Custodian and his subordinates understood that ‘books, papers’ and ‘historical’ items constituted movable property. It makes their absence from evacuee property studies to date all the more notable.Footnote ⁵²

Despite the Record Office’s haste to secure items of potential interest, there were hiccups along the way. Chopra had to stay vigilant—he paid attention to press notices of auctions—to ensure that his Office was not deprived of old coins and other spoils (alternately, ‘safeguarding historical objects’ as he phrased it).Footnote ⁵³ Where was this money going, and who was buying these objects? What kind of material—aside from books, manuscripts, or coins—was being auctioned? One could speculate that any official monetary gains went towards the ‘compensation pool’ that the Government of India created by consolidating all Muslim evacuee property, from which it proposed to recompense incoming Hindus and Sikhs. But this arrangement was only formalized in October 1954, through the Displaced Persons (Compensation and Rehabilitation) Act,Footnote ⁵⁴ a full five years after these events. Was the Government of East Punjab running its own scheme?

East Punjab and evacuee property

There are many unanswered questions about the imperatives driving the state accumulation of dispersed movable evacuee property at this time. Studies of the lived reality of the border in Bengal,Footnote ⁵⁵ and the varied accounts of the experience of partition, can make for harrowing reading, exposing the tremendous gap between an order and its implementation on the ground. Refugees were often ‘made’, encouraged by an ‘ecology of fear’ and ‘routine violence’, to migrate.Footnote ⁵⁶ Insidious networks of smuggling, corruption, organized crime, and violent militias were exacerbated by a solidifying border (especially in Punjab) that often resulted in people losing all their possessions before they could reach safety, assuming they did so alive.Footnote ⁵⁷

Incoming refugees occupied evacuee property with tenacity, and the ferocity with which they fought for their right to remain has been recognized as a key factor that determined the Government of India’s decision to prevent Muslim migrants’ return—it had ‘already lost the argument on the ground’ and needed evacuees’ homes to house incoming Hindus and Sikhs.Footnote ⁵⁸ This has been described as an example of the ground-up shaping of the rights of citizens, and a failure of the liberal policies and intentions of the two governments.Footnote ⁵⁹ Likewise, across the border in Pakistan, there were too many Muslim refugees for the new nation to absorb, and both countries needed evacuee assets to accommodate new arrivals. Scholars have noted the interrelated nature of evacuee property legislation in India and Pakistan, often characterized as ‘tit-for-tat’, as the measures grew more draconian and exclusionary.Footnote ⁶⁰

The academic focus on houses and agricultural land (compounded by the loose interpretation of ‘movable property’)Footnote ⁶¹ has led to a lacuna in our understanding of exactly how quite so many books and manuscripts accumulated with the Custodian of Evacuee Property. It seems extraordinary that gangs would have robbed fleeing refugees of books rather than jewellery, or that their victims were carrying them (in preference to more practical or precious items).Footnote ⁶² But we do know that for some refugees, books were a top priority. The Partition Museum in Amritsar, for example, holds in its collection a copy of the Muraqqa-i-Chughtai (verses by Mirza Ghalib illustrated by Abdur Rahman Chughtai), which was one of the few precious objects Basant Kishan Khanna, his wife Leelavati, and their children carried from Lahore when they fled on 14 August 1947, thinking they would return soon.Footnote ⁶³ But refugee accounts seldom specify the possessions that either circumstances or individuals forced them to surrender.Footnote ⁶⁴

It is of course possible that researchers have not previously thought to ask, or have omitted details in publication, thinking them unimportant. But it is evident that these acquisitions recast our understanding of the workings of evacuee property legislation and the experiences of ‘citizen refugees’Footnote ⁶⁵ and destabilize the certainties that found regional and national identity. Oral accounts indicate that some people managed to return and retrieve possessions from their abandoned homes, sometimes enabled by faithful friends or because conscientious new occupants preserved them. In fact, the presence of movable personal effects in one’s house was one of the few ways through which temporary migrants could attempt to prove ownership and challenge (usually without success) requisitions by the governments of India and Pakistan.Footnote ⁶⁶

In point of fact, India and Pakistan had agreed, by 1953, to allow the duty-free removal of personal and household effects, barring ‘machinery or machine parts, merchandise and trade goods, unsown cloth…in excess of personal needs, cattle, cash in excess of permitted quantities, and bullion’, all of which could either be reclaimed (requiring a migrant to return) or sold within the country of original residence.Footnote ⁶⁷ But the anti-minority rhetoric that had been building up since partition characterized such attempts as efforts to shift capital, destabilize the economy, and thus as ‘anti-national’. Movable property was ‘redefined’ and imbued with ‘nationality’; ‘property, which had hitherto been owned by individuals, now came to be seen as belonging to the nation’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Thus in an ironic twist, while their owners, a human resource, became unwanted evacuees and forced refugees, cultural resources became a coveted asset to rebuild and reassert regional and national identity.

By and large, people moved in a hurry, with no time to pack or make arrangements to move their possessions later. But there were also numerous cases of people from the better educated, informed, and wealthier classes being able to liquidate and transfer their assets to ‘safe zones’Footnote ⁶⁹ (providing ammunition for accusations of anti-national intentions). But notwithstanding the fact that it may have been chiefly the poor and illiterate who were left to fend for themselves (or even prevented from moving in the ‘national interest’),Footnote ⁷⁰ there was enough material for the Record Office staff to go through. The archives have not (yet) revealed how large numbers of such objects were funnelled through to them.

Recent work on the personal objects that encapsulate partition for refugees, and on the affective nature of partition, reiterates the visceral impact that objects can and do have.Footnote ⁷¹ Who, then, were the people or agencies that bid for and acquired the material rejected by the Record Office? What effect did the provenance or physical presence of these objects have? These evocative questions have never been considered; while they must lie outside the scope of the present discussion, they bear further investigation.

Studies of partition and state formation in independent India and Pakistan have noted the significant gaps between central policy and implementation on the ground.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, research suggests broad continuities between colonial and postcolonial regimes, in the gap between ‘the disordered character of local reality and the abstract logic of governance’.Footnote ⁷³ But this is not a question of one or two individuals making a communally biased decision, contravening government policy. Rather, the chasm between the mandate of a government office (buttressed by inter-governmental agreements) and its implementation stands exposed.

And it was deliberate. None of the files containing this information is marked ‘secret’, nor does the tone of communication suggest any view to conceal. Chopra became agitated over auctions of evacuee property after seeing press notices,Footnote ⁷⁴ so it is evident that the information was in the public domain. Further, while scholars have noted Pakistan’s protests at Indian moves to attach land and houses (and vice versa), no one seems to have fussed about public auctions of movable property. Was it a blatant disregard for orders, and were such auctions held in Pakistan? Was the Custodian taking matters into his own hands (empowered, of course, by the Government of India)?Footnote ⁷⁵

There is enough evidence to assert that there were mechanisms and rationales in place to collect and manage movable property in far greater numbers and variety than we have hitherto realized. The centrality of evacuee property in shaping both citizens and states in South Asia means that this is a crucial area of research that awaits investigation—we still only know the outlines and are yet to flesh out the details.

By the end of 1949, the Historical Records Office had amassed ‘over half a million files and cases, 4,500 books, 400 manuscripts, 1022 coins and 100 other documents’. It was a collection, the Keeper noted with self-congratulation, that was ‘as good as can be found anywhere in Northern India’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Furthermore, it was,

The attention paid to quantities was a way to make the connection with Punjab’s past tangible. But it also reveals the scale of the yields from evacuee property. For if the old office contained Secretariat records alone, then, given what we now know, Muslim migrants were the source of many of the ‘new’ books, manuscripts, coins, and documents Chopra listed with quiet satisfaction.

In addition to their personal property being thus appropriated, evacuee individuals were rendered nameless and faceless. Chopra’s report dehumanizes them by referring to ‘the evacuee dumps’ that he or his team visited, to select and ‘rescue’ many important items, which his office later ‘suitably preserved’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The list itself, sadly, was absent from the copy of the report I consulted. So, while we cannot be sure of the detailed nature of these items, we should not assume that they reflect the region’s Islamic heritage, exclusively—or even primarily.

The overwhelming image is of finding treasures in rubbish heaps, eerily reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps. Nazis officers rooted through the ‘garbage’ that comprised the personal possessions and the bodies of their victims to find whatever valuables they could claim (heaped in ‘dumps’) for the war effort and economic gainFootnote ⁷⁹—‘public purpose’Footnote ⁸⁰ in another form. But unlike post-Second World War attempts to return art collections to their pre-War owners, there was no question of restitution here, even in theory.

Evacuee property legislation as a whole has determined the way in which citizenship has come to be defined, especially for religious minorities in South Asia.Footnote ⁸¹ The sweeping powers and ‘curious legal status’ of the office of the Custodian of Evacuee Property (it was outside the purview of the judiciary) have cast a long shadow on the larger question of asset redistribution and certain citizens’ right to privacy, occupancy, mobility, and movable and immovable property after independence.Footnote ⁸² This article has established that the shadow extends even further, to shape museum collections and the histories they are able to tell. But the full import of what this might mean requires further investigation. For instance, in contrast to traditional approaches to South Asian museums through archaeology, art history, and anthropology, how viable would a new route of enquiry, framed in terms of individual versus institutional rights to property, be?

These are not mere academic matters. Few mechanisms acknowledge donors in Indian museums, which makes it even less likely that they will recognize the contributions (willing or otherwise) of nameless migrants to a ‘foreign’ land. The discoveries outlined in this article have, at least, serious ethical repercussions for Indian museum professionals.Footnote ⁸³ Any attempts to address them will come up against the problem of how to rationalize evacuee—later ‘enemy’—property as foundational to national and regional identity.

However, museums also exemplify the tangible power of objects to forge connections between people; they thus offer possibilities for reconciliation at an individual level with South Asia’s troubled history. There are numerous examples from around the world, from Bosnia Herzegovina to Northern Ireland, of museums and art being harnessed towards post-conflict resolution.Footnote ⁸⁴ It remains an essential component of the international mandate for museums,Footnote ⁸⁵ which renders its absence in South Asia a glaring omission.

East Punjab’s ‘other’ sources of acquisition

Private individuals in East Punjab (Hindu and Sikh), by contrast, had more agency. Their names appear in the correspondence (if not in the report summaries). They often warranted their own files, and (it must be emphasized) received compensation for their contribution to the collecting effort. The government mounted a ‘vigorous’ awareness campaign,

Government efforts included advertisements ‘in the leading dailies of Northern India’ resulting in ‘a wide response’ with ‘several collections of books, manuscripts, paintings and coins’ being brought to the Department’s notice. Chopra, in the name of the Department, pursued, persuaded, and negotiated with people to loan or sell, using letters such as this one:Footnote ⁸⁷

The letter went on to detail the ‘uphill task’ that this constituted, listed what kind of material was being sought, and claimed the ‘active help’ of the addressee. The ‘Keeper Records’ hoped that their ‘fine national and cultural sense’ would help them ‘appreciate the nature of [the] endeavour’ and concede to his request to at least copy materials.Footnote ⁸⁹

In one case, Chopra went to Delhi to examine ‘a very valuable collection of historical relics’ owned by a ‘Shri Jainarain Singh, P. C. S retired’, who had got in touch with the Chief Secretary’s office. Singh in turn was ‘successful in persuading another gentleman Ch. Hari Singh to show…[Chopra]…his old collection of manuscripts and books’, and wrote twice to urge Chopra to return to Delhi for the purpose.Footnote ⁹⁰ Furthermore,

One cannot overstate the scale of the effort made in infrastructural and monetary terms. Spending Rs 40,000 in January 1957Footnote ⁹² would be the equivalent of over three million (Rs 30 lakhs) today.Footnote ⁹³ Eight years previously, in 1949 (when Chopra recorded the above purchases), it would have been worth even more in today’s terms.

That the Punjab and national government spent millions on refugee rehabilitation is well-known, though this is often downplayed by recipients who, according to Ian Talbot, attribute their subsequent success to their own hard work and resourcefulness.Footnote ⁹⁴ It is instructive to compare the outflow on historic materials (of which the above account is but one of many) with that on refugees. For instance, Talbot notes that Rs 15 lakhs (1,500,000) was set aside for small grants of Rs 500 to petty shopkeepers, which would have served 3,000 people.Footnote ⁹⁵ The instance of purchase quoted above represents 2.6 per cent of this fund, representing grants to 80 people. While the overall sums spent on refugee rehabilitation and relief (over Rs 190 million) must have outstripped expenditure on object acquisition (the sums of which must remain speculative in the absence of adequate data), they nevertheless make clear that collecting was a priority of the utmost seriousness for the East Punjab government.

A mere two years after partition, when violence had abated but the demands on the East Punjab government were by no means over, it nevertheless believed in the importance of investing in cultural heritage, over and above what it was able to acquire ‘on the cheap’ from evacuee sources. The Department’s reports attest to this. Describing the wide range of activities undertaken until the end of the 1960s,Footnote ⁹⁶ they make clear not only the labour and tedium that went into running and maintaining an archive but the monies that the state was willing to disburse on collections, infrastructure, and personnel.

The difference in the Department’s or the East Punjab government’s attitude to acquisitions from individuals can best be understood by considering the ways in which states or regimes exercise power. Scholars in diverse fields, ranging from anthropology to political science, art history, archaeology, and history, have unpacked the colonial encounter to demonstrate the rupture, change, and overarching forms of knowledge that it created in South Asia. This work has highlighted the manner in which the colonial project rendered local subjects faceless and nameless. Individuals were reduced to an illustrative type or a cipher in the enumerative, knowledge-gathering, world-shaping projects beloved of the colonial regime. Alternately, they were written out of the collaborative ventures that in truth most undertakings were. Other scholars have pushed back against this, to (re)inscribe native voices, agency, resistance, and subversion in this story, even while acknowledging continuities and adaptations.Footnote ⁹⁷

Both arguments are valid. The resulting deliberations (from what are presented as polemical positions) have served to enrich our understanding of the impact of power, by opening up a spectrum of possible interpretations. Yet it is the very shape of the debate that makes my point: historians and curators regard the act of naming and crediting native informants as the appropriate way to redress the many erasures of colonial sources. Today, whether it is the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, the Auschwitz/Oswiecim concentration camp, or collaborative projects with source communities undertaken by the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, the overwhelming emphasis is on identifying, naming, and therefore acknowledging individuals.

So not only does the ‘long partition’ continue; it does so in a way we have not yet considered, situated at the heart of the process by which East Punjab sought to reconnect with its roots, heritage, and identity—in tangible form.Footnote ⁹⁸ The state in East Punjab dispossessed and rendered Muslim evacuees nameless by the way in which it collected for Punjab after partition, with no conceivable mode of redress. Those forced to donate, lost any claim on the culture and history that these objects represented, and along with them, their links to particular geographical roots or affinities.

Collecting, citizenship, and identity

Although it reflects the importance of records to the apparatus of government, what else might explain the urge to collect and archive? One motivation might be the ‘fiercely acquisitive’ nature of national identity, and contesting claims over icons or markers of heritage shared with others.Footnote ⁹⁹ An exhibition constitutes a political arena in which to assert and contest definitions of identity and culture, and art museums perform ceremonial and ritual functions.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Simon Knell, in a similar vein, has commented on how museums constitute a space for performing the myths of nationhood, made ‘so much more believable’ because we see ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ objects in front of us, ‘not merely props’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ For East Punjab’s existence to be real, then, and the logic of partition and nationhood to be believable, it needed to collect.

In addition to the compelling stage offered by museums, powerful local factors may have been at play too. Anne Murphy has explored the ‘rich meanings of Sikh objects’, through which ‘the past is experienced and proved, and history narrated and performed for a transnational religious community, within a religious setting as well as cultural, artistic and political ones’.Footnote ¹⁰² Her wide-ranging analysis investigates Sikh notions of history and historiography, and she also makes the point that the compulsions of the colonial encounter stimulated novel forms of historical memory—in this case, the preoccupations of the Gurudwara Reform Movement, which required that ‘Sikhness and history had to be proven and directly related to land’.Footnote ¹⁰³ In her endeavour to ‘explore the formation of the Sikh community through the commemoration of the past and the construction of a historical consciousness out of a range of memorial forms’,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ she focuses on the ‘marking of Sikh territory, based on the past’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It led to ‘land [being] turned into territory…[by being] inhabited, appropriated, or recognised in some form’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

I speculate that what Murphy characterizes as a special Sikh notion of territoriality could spill over to influence how many Punjabis related to the land,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ and how they imagined their territory, augmented by the bond of a shared Punjabi language.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Murphy also notes the secondary role and importance of historical objects, since they ‘escaped some of the pressures put upon the site as the embodiment of the historical’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ (being regarded as personal property), and only recently beginning to attract attention for their historical worth and value as ‘memorial technologies’. But if Sikhness—and maybe, by extension, Punjabiness—was so intimately entwined with ‘territorialised place’,Footnote ¹¹⁰ I suggest instead that it was in response to the violent sundering and wrenching away from territory occasioned by partition (and the consequent search for roots) that historic objects gained in value. East Punjab, then, may have been especially fertile ground for collecting. If, as Murphy further suggests, the ‘territorialised landscape of the Sikh past created was…a museumised space, produced for consumption of the land’, demonstrated by the gurudwara guides’ ‘tour-museum sensibility’, and the phenomenon of the ‘historical museum’ in gurudwaras,Footnote ¹¹¹ East Punjab’s denizens had also been ‘prepped’ to need a museum in a unique way.

As newly minted Indian citizens (that too, on a frontier), it was thus perhaps ‘natural’ for Chopra, his colleagues, and the larger public, unmoored by partition, to desire the opposite: to search for roots and a sense of belonging through an established past. Collecting (or contributing to collections) offered a powerful, tangible way to articulate citizenship, claim belonging, and imagine East Punjab. This argument is rendered more compelling when we consider the practices of exclusion discussed herein, which were built into the system. Muslim refugees were dispossessed of their cultural heritage as they were of their claim to East Punjab, as a consequence, and in corroboration, of partition.

The politics and ethics of collecting for East Punjab

Donald Preziosi has noted that the process of collecting, re-collecting, and de-collecting is itself significant, and that the various stages intertwine. There is a deliberate erasure of the previous meanings and functions of objects by the very act of collecting objects,Footnote ¹¹² every time they are collected. But if this ‘normalizes’ the erasure of evacuee ownership from East Punjab’s archival collections as a universal feature of how we collect, it does not absolve museums and archives of their responsibility to recover collection histories. Museums do not exist in a bubble. They are enmeshed in the politics and society around them; this point may have become obvious and better broadcast in recent years, but was never not the case. While this is by now a well-rehearsed argument in the context of colonial museums in South Asia, it requires emphasis in the era of the nation state:

Thus far, the focus of this article has been on the historical relevance and implications of East Punjab’s collecting policies in the immediate aftermath of partition, but these discoveries have significance for much else besides: museum historiography and practice in the region, and how South Asian collections are exhibited elsewhere. They also have a bearing on current debates about the uneven implementation, experience, and legacy of decolonization as a whole (not just of the museum).

‘We live in an age of apology and recrimination’,Footnote ¹¹⁴ in which previously victimized or marginalized groups have come to demand—if not always with success, but with more visibility—redressal for past wrongs in various ways, ranging from public apologies to compensation or reparations. When considering the ‘effects of historical memory on the political affairs of nations’,Footnote ¹¹⁵ and evaluating the factors that might lead a country to choose from a spectrum of responses ranging from apology to redressal to refusal,Footnote ¹¹⁶ historic objects have a central role available to them. Not only do they ‘encode’ memories, allowing them to be shared, but also ‘exposure to cultural artifacts carrying different memories and that are based in historical facts can lead to a shift in the collective memory over time’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Despite their failings, therefore, museums retain their power and potential to effect positive change.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Significant shifts have occurred in museum practice and international legislation to accommodate the debate on the ownership and restitution of cultural property, producing diverse scenarios.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In South Asia, in the colonial context, ‘cultural’ (much of it archaeological and courtly) and ‘ethnographic’ categories of objects are most likely to be found outside the subcontinent. Typical demands for restitution and repatriation from India focus on the former—the sword of Tipu Sultan and the Kohinoor diamond to name two famous examples. In comparison ‘ethnographic’ objects receive far less public and government attention as ‘lower’ value objects, and requests tend to be made directly from source communities to holding institutions.Footnote ¹²⁰ It is largely (though not exclusively) ‘ethnographic’ collections (which include human remains), by contrast, that are at the centre of the current international storm over decolonizing museums and the question of returning looted or illegally procured collections.

In response, museums, national governments where applicable, and international bodies like the United Nations have evolved a range of strategies: from digging their heels in; to acknowledging difficult histories and initiating belated research projects to recover provenance; enacting legislation or international agreements on cultural property; facilitating long-term loans; and finding creative ways to enable restitution, including the use of digital technology. There are challenges and complications, such as the question of who is authorized to speak for whom, and who the stakeholders in such situations are. These matters are the mere tip of the iceberg: not only is this a cursory review of a large and complex issue, it is a live one which museums, their publics, and their governments are in the midst of shaping; a debate that we do not yet know the outcome of.

Yet while there is a substantial—and growing—body of work in the museum, heritage, and culture fields on why historic erasures were significant and how museums have or could address them,Footnote ¹²¹ no study of South Asian museums considers the role of the postcolonial nation itself in such matters. I argue that the objects unmoored by partition and collected for East Punjab’s museums constitute a third, even ‘postcolonial’, category of objects that the state and its apparatus dispersed in the course of nation-making.

Given the significant legal resources that both India and Pakistan have invested over the years in shoring up their claims over evacuee property, it is unlikely that Indian museums will ever acknowledge such objects as illegal acquisitions. But the evidence is clear: they were unethical. Recent efforts by partition survivors and their descendants to recover and record the varied experiences of that ‘long’ moment have attested to the catharsis it can afford. So, although ‘at times it may make sense’ to seek closure over shared historical events, and at others, prove ‘impossible or too costly to do so’,Footnote ¹²² the museum collections of East Punjab continue to offer real possibility, and hope, for reconciliation.