NEW DELHI: You must have heard about the tragedies suffered by the people on the trains to and from Pakistan but what if you get a virtual reality experience of what happened inside those trains? Also, you must have seen refugee camps set up in Delhi during partition in old TV serials and Bollywood movies but what if you get to see the replica of one such refugee camp where two or more families were made to live?
With an aim to take us to the memory lanes of partition and feel the pain and trauma suffered by the people on both sides of the border, a partition museum was inaugurated on Thursday at the Mughal-era Dara Shikoh Library building on the Ambedkar University campus. The museum is housed in the erstwhile residence of Dara Shikoh, son of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan.
This is the second such museum after the Partition Museum of Amritsar, located in the historic Town Hall. The Delhi’s partition museum will take you to the seven galleries to explain the events leading up to the partition, and independence, migration, refugees, rebuilding homes, art, relationships and will also have a gallery of hope and courage.
The museum features a wooden sculpture of a horse loaded with skeletons and bones, a fallen house depicting the difficulties in rehabilitation, donated belongings of people who witnessed the partition like that of a wedding card dated February 1947 and the family recalling it as the last peaceful wedding in Lahore; the wheat drum of one of the travellers, bed posts carried across the border by one of the families, an iron vessel carried by another traveller while moving from Multan to Delhi and even a passport copy used for commuting between India and Pakistan in the initial days among other countless photographs and news clippings of those days.
The museum will also offer ‘oral’ history narratives. This project collected oral histories documented by people who witnessed partition but are no longer among us today.These oral interactions are peppered across the galleries and the visitors can listen to their recordings using the headphones available.Entry to the partition museum in Delhi is available via a free token system through the official website.
Also, once you enter the museum, you can scan a barcode through your phone to get an experience of a walk-through narrated by Kishwar Desai, chairperson of the Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust.Inaugurating the museum, Delhi Art & culture minister Atishi said, “The unique thing about the museum is its ability to connect the past with the present. My own family was a partition survivor.”
