Virtual Kolkata Partition Museum
The Virtual Kolkata Partition Museum (henceforth, V-KPM) is a part of the larger Kolkata Partition Museum (KPM) Project that aims to establish a Partition museum in Kolkata, focused on the Bengal experience. The two main emphases of KPM are historical specificity and cultural continuity.
V-KPM is a collaboration between the Kolkata Partition Museum Trust (KPMT) and AUR (Architecture Urbanism Research), New York – New Delhi. Initiated in early 2021 and launched during the 75th anniversary of India’s Partition in August 2022, at ICCR Kolkata, V-KPM is a labour of love by a multi-disciplinary team bound together by a deep and passionate engagement with the Bengal Partition, in life and work. The design and architecture of V-KPM is led by Aurgho Jyoti (Founder and Creative Director of AUR) and the research and content is led by Rituparna Roy (Initiator of KPM and Managing Trustee of KPM Trust).
The three components of V-KPM:
Event Gallery
The Event Gallery acts as a marker to chronologically navigate the temporal landscape of Partition. It highlights major events related – and leading up – to the Bengal Partition of 1947, which are represented as sub-galleries. The events include, among others, 1905: the first Partition of Bengal; 1943: the Bengal Famine; 1946: ‘Direct Action Day’; 1947: Independence and second Partition of Bengal; 1958: the Dandakaranya Project; 1971: the Liberation War of Bangladesh; and 1979: the Marichjhapi Massacre. There are also several galleries devoted exclusively to the Partition experience of the Northeast, a narrative that is too often lost in the Bengal story of Partition.
Oral History Project
The Oral History Project (OHP) is an independent project undertaken for V-KPM. Supervised by its lead historian, Anindita Ghoshal, it brings together the work of six young and talented scholars – Asmita Ray, Firdousi Akhtar Wasid, Gitanjali Roy, Mohana Chatterjee, Sumallya Mukhopadhyay and Swagatalakhmi Saha – who have conducted interviews on behalf of V-KPM and/or shared their personal oral history (doctoral) research with us.
The Bengal Partition of 1947 not only affected the state of West Bengal but also Assam and Tripura in the Northeast; and in the succeeding decades, led to low-caste refugees being dispersed in far-flung parts of the subcontinent, including Dandakaranya in central India. The 22 interviews that make up the OHP represent a wide cross-section of these refugees, highlighting a subaltern narrative of forced migration within the context of contemporary politics.
Art Gallery
The Art Gallery explores the artistic response to the political upheavals of the 1940s in Bengal – from the Bengal Famine to the Partition, and its long aftermath in the decades to follow. It also engages with contemporary artists who work on the subject of Partition from a second/third generation perspective, or whose practice reflects on displacement or exile in a larger context. Finally, in a radical departure from curatorial convention, it features the art of some school children related to their experience of the Bengal border. Accordingly, the gallery has been structured into three sub-galleries – art by ‘Modernists’, ‘Contemporaries’, and ‘Children’s Art on the Border’.
The design of V-KPM:
The Kolkata Partition Museum, in its virtual form, is a contemplation in space and time. The museum provides a cinematic platform to experience and comprehend the Partition of Bengal through an immersive environment. In keeping with the vision of the larger KPM project, it memorializes the “specificity of Bengal’s Partition history and its aftermath” and emphasizes the “continuities between West Bengal and Bangladesh.” An inquiry into the brief historical evolution of Bengal contextualizes the project. Underlining the subaltern refugee narratives of involuntary migration, it breaks away from the outmoded museum, as a colonial project, to one that creates an ‘ethical project’.
The project creates an atmosphere of austere materiality orchestrated by light and shadow in a spatio-temporal compression to create experiences that trigger cultural memory. The visitor navigates concentric worlds of time, each layer signifying a temporal threshold for a historical period (pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial) represented through the period’s prevailing material memory – mud, earth, brick, terracotta, plastered white wall, and concrete. The central inner space, the ‘Archaeologies of Memory’, deliberated as an archaeological site, houses isolated fragments of habitation and means of transportation, from the past, with discrete experiences integrating subaltern oral history narratives.