Partition Museum

The Partition Museum occupies Amritsar's Town Hall, a building that once housed British offices and a jail, and opened in August 2017. Calling itself a people's museum, it follows the road to the division of the subcontinent and its aftermath, from the anti-colonial movement through the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the Komagata Maru episode to the split between the Congress and the Muslim League.

Its 14 galleries rely heavily on objects given by survivors and their families: pocket watches, cooking pots, trunks and tin boxes, coins, black-and-white family photographs and the rope cots refugees carried across the new border. Audio-visual stations play more than 100 recorded interviews, and reprints of works by the painters Krishen Khanna, Satish Gujral and, among others, S. L. Parasher show how artists responded. The museum keeps gathering oral histories, papers and film.