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
Repatriation Without Patria
Most claims for the repatriation of artefacts are made by newly sovereign nations, or by communities emerging from a period of domination. They dispute the legal and moral rights of former powers to remove objects from their original home. What meanings can ‘repatriation’ have for Tibet, which exists both as a province of China and as an exile community that has established a ‘virtual’ nation with a government-in-exile? This article studies some Tibetan artefacts that have been in circulation since 1959, to show the ambiguities surrounding ideas of a ‘home’ for such objects; in this context, removing an object from its original location can be an act of theft and of salvage. The author demonstrates how the idea of ‘repatriation’ is often invoked in relation to the current global circulation of Tibetan artefacts in order to make claims about legitimacy and nationhood.
Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death
Grassroots memorials have become major areas of focus during times of trauma, danger, and social unrest. These improvised memorial assemblages continue to display new and more dynamic ways of representing collective and individual identities and in doing so reveal the steps that shape the national memories of those who struggle to come to terms with traumatic loss. This volume focuses on the hybrid quality of these temporary memorials as both monuments of mourning and as focal points for protest and expression of discontent. The broad range of case studies in this volume include anti-mafia shrines, Theo van Gogh’s memorial, September 11th memorials, March 11th shrines in Madrid, and Carlo Giuliani memorials in Genoa.