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Since the Khalsa Heritage Complex was a brand new project, and existing museums would be unlikely to part with historic objects from their collections for its sake, assembling the museum’s display presented a challenge. For this reason the Khalsa Heritage Complex was conceived as a storytelling museum which would use reproductions and audiovisual technology to deliver a message, rather than as a history or art museum that would need to display valuable original relics or artifacts.

At its inception, Safdie recommended that exhibit development be overseen by Jeshajahu Weinberg, the founding director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. As Safdie explained, Weinberg’s experience of working with cutting-edge displays in multiple media would “be helpful in pulling together the program, briefs, and story lines into an exhibit script.”¹⁰ With architecture designed by Safdie, and storylines to be developed by Weinberg, the project seemed poised to take advantage of Holocaust museum expertise to develop a similar narration of the Sikh experience. The elegiac mode of the planned museum was also signaled by the name chosen for it: Khalsa Heritage Memorial Museum.

Although Weinberg was appointed as a consultant, the Punjab government also set up a committee of local scholars, religious advisers, and museologists to work out a broad plan for the museum. And this is where the blueprint of the Holocaust museum began to fray at the edges. The committee began by questioning the very name of the complex. Memorials were made for things that belonged in the past. The Khalsa was a flourishing community, so what sense did it make to call this a memorial, they asked. Accordingly, the project was renamed the Khalsa Heritage Complex, immediately suggesting a celebration of culture rather than the memorialization of a vexed history.

The premise on which the narrative was to be developed was also called into question. B. N. Goswamy, an eminent art historian who was part of the committee, recalled a preliminary briefing in which he was told that the museum would relate the unique story of Sikh suffering. “Every community has suffered,” he observed: “This is not the special prerogative of the Sikhs” (pers. comm. 2000). Indeed, through the years of Sikh militancy in Punjab, Hindus were often the targets of its violence; as a prominent Hindu figure in Panjab University, Goswamy himself had received death threats from Sikh terrorists. A one-sided victimology of Sikhs could hardly pass muster in a content committee whose members represented a wide range of backgrounds and interests. This committee soon produced a document that spelled out the major themes and principles to be followed in the museum. The 13 topics were universality; equality; freedom of conscience; social justice; heroism and martyrdom; high spirits; love; service and sacrifice; goal of life; harmony with nature; man as custodian of life on the planet; dignity, selfrespect and honor; and ecumenism. The martial history of the Sikhs and their record of martyrdom were reduced to a single topic among many others.

The exhibition design was awarded to the National Institute of Design’s Department for Exhibition Design rather than being handed over to a foreign consultant. Even after the attenuation of the theme of Sikh suffering in the project brief, however, the exhibition designers whom I interviewed recalled that the emphasis on martyrdom persisted in the institutional plans. On seeing the allocation of floor space to the various galleries, Ambrish Arora, a designer who worked on the project, recalled: “There was a section for the gurus, but the section on martyrdom was huge” (interview, 2011). The head of the design team, Amar Behl, noted that a very large proportion of the galleries on the Gurus was devoted to the tenth guru, Guru Gobind Singh, whose bloody clashes with the imperial authorities led to the deaths of countless followers and all his sons. In comparison, very little space was set aside for Guru Nanak, the peaceable founder of the faith. “Where is my Baba Nanak, I asked? What happens to his message? I reversed the ratio of the galleries,” Behl says; “I reduced the space for Guru Gobind and I increased the space for Guru Nanak” (interview, 2006).

Clearly, through the long processes of consultation, research, and design, the narrative of the Khalsa Heritage Complex moved away from the martyrological mode. Rather than focusing on the history of martial valor and narratives of suffering and martyrdom – associated with the latter phase of the guru period – it came to stress the values of peace, tolerance, and egalitarianism that were the hallmarks of Sikhism’s earlier phase.

Thirteen years after Badal and Safdie had met in Jerusalem, the results of this process became apparent when the first phase of the museum opened to the public in November 2011. The galleries that have thus far opened occupy the Boat Building and the Flower Building, and tell the story of the lives of the 10 Sikh gurus. Visitors enter the museum at the upper level of the Boat Building and find themselves on a ramp that gently leads them down through the building to the ground level. As they descend, they pass by triple-height walls that are covered by an enormous hand-painted mural that is 75 feet high and 240 feet wide. Designed by a well-known graphic novelist, the mural’s interwoven scenes delineate a densely peopled Punjab landscape in affectionate and humorous detail. The mural’s scenes bring together medieval saints and modern migrants, trucks on roadways and cows in pasture, in a series of vignettes that borrow the language of Indian miniature painting. The timed walk through this gallery is animated by light and sound effects. As visitors enter, the gallery is suffused by deep blue light that gradually turns rosy pink, and then brilliantly bright, eventually fading into darkness once more. The changing illumination suggests both the diurnal cycle from dawn through noon to night as well as the annual cycle of the seasons of spring, summer, monsoon, and winter. The accompanying soundscape uses sounds of nature, instrumental music, and rousing folk songs. Together, sound and image in the gallery celebrate the landscape and lifeways of Punjab. Although there are specifically Sikh elements in the mural – scenes of village gurudwaras, Amritsar’s Golden Temple, and even the Khalsa Heritage Complex itself – the introductory gallery does not present Sikhism per se, but the culture of Punjab at large: as we see men and women laboring in fields and marketplaces, caring for families and celebrating festivals, we witness an inclusive narrative that embeds the Sikh community in a universal story of human beings living out their lives.

In the galleries that follow, this broadening of the museum’s message continues, I believe, in a subliminal way, through the choices made in the visual idiom of the display. The lives and teachings of the Sikh gurus are described by an audio guide while visitors move through installations of hand-painted and digitally printed murals, textile hangings, sculptures, fiber optics, animation videos, multiscreen video projections, and immersive architectural environments. These exhibits weave the warp of their narratives with the weft of an exquisite aesthetic that derives its motifs primarily from Indian miniature paintings and Mughal architecture, and occasionally from modern and contemporary art (Figure 2.2).

The visual language of the exhibits embeds the Khalsa Heritage Complex’s story of Sikhism within traditions that have been canonized as “mainstream” Indian civilization; the lyrical aesthetic of the exhibits makes them celebratory in their mode. Instead of the highly charged and ultimately divisive message that one might have expected of a Sikh history museum that was initially inspired by a museum dedicated to the Holocaust, we have here a narrative that places Sikh history within a celebration of Indian civilization; one that meshes with the “authorized heritage discourse” (Smith 2006) and the “official culture” of the Indian state.