Ghosts of Future Nations, or The Uses of the Holocaust Museum Paradigm in India
This chapter discusses two twenty-first-century museum projects in India dedicated to the historical traumas of two different communities. The first of these, the Khalsa Heritage Complex, addresses the Sikh community and is a multimillion-dollar project whose high-tech displays are housed in spectacular “starchitecture.” The other, far more modest, project is sponsored by the Tibetan refugee community in their exile capital at Dharamsala. Though the two museums are vastly different in scale, architecture, and ambition, this chapter shows how both museums were inspired by Jewish Holocaust museums. But forms of Jewish Holocaust memorialization cannot simply be “cut” from one place and “pasted” in another, for local contexts and politics exert their own pushes and pulls on these projects. By comparing the differing fortunes of these two projects, this chapter discusses the circumstances in which a difficult memory becomes possible, or a difficult amnesia becomes a necessity. 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
exile Tibet; 
holocaust museum; 
JuBus ; 
Khalistan; 
Khalsa Heritage Complex; 
Moshe Safdie; 
Anandpur Sahib; 
Sikh martyrdom; 
Tibet Museum; 
Yad Vashem
Curating divinity: Religious souvenirs, shopkeepers and bazaar curation
This paper explores the universe of souvenirs of Sikh Gurus and martyrs available in the bazaars around Sikhism’s most sacred shrine, the Darbar Sahib in Amritsar. Rather like objects in museum exhibitions, souvenir art actively produces ideas of divinity and martyrdom. The deliberate arrangements of Guru and martyr souvenirs in shopwindows demonstrate the ‘sense’ of curation of ordinary shopkeepers in the bazaar. Shop displays, I argue, resemble the care of sacred art by museum curators. But there is more to shop displays than mere imitation. I analyse the vis-à-vis between the souvenir displays of two modern martyrs, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the militant leader of separatist Khalistan, and Bhagat Singh, the nationalist hero, that express bazaar understandings of martyr souvenirs as affective objects, possessing both ritual and political value. The curated displays in museums and shopwindows are critical in creating a conscious, purposive aura around modern Sikh martyrdom.
Letting Women in? Gender Mainstreaming in Regional Policies
Gender mainstreaming has over the last ten years become the dominant strategy of integrating gender issues in public policy. This article presents regional policy as a broad and increasingly important policy field to study, and analyses gender mainstreaming in this policy field in the Norwegian and the Swedish contexts. How do problem representations surrounding “gender equality” and “gender mainstreaming” produce meanings of gender as well as construct possibilities for change? The article shows that, despite some differences between the two countries, gender mainstreaming in regional policy can to a large extent be read as meaning “women”. Women are in this context given a narrow subject position and are constructed as lacking what it takes to produce sustainable regional growth. The concluding discussion highlights the relations between the implementation of gender mainstreaming and neo‐liberal political trends.