Virtual Museum: Kolkata to Get a Virtual Partition Museum from 24 August

Next week, Kolkata will get a museum, yet virtual until further notice. As a partition museum, it will display art and literature which reflects connections between individuals behind the barbed wire and the trauma of the earth.

Partition researcher Rituparna Roy, who leads the Kolkata Partition Museum project (KPMP), said the motivation behind building the museum is to recognize the encounter of eastern India, including Bengal, with the Partition, its outcome and eternity, to the fullest possible way.

The idea of establishing a museum conceived in Roy's mind when she was staying in Europe. She used to visit memorials and war museums when she realised that West Bengal and Bangladesh have very different postcolonial trajectories.

"We don't deny that there was a partition, and there were reasons for it, there were fault line for which it happened. We are not saying that we will unite like Germany. We will remember the Division and we will present all theories about it." Roy said.

"There is another aspect of the Division which is continuity. Considering the deeply dividing times we live in, we want to remember that as well," she added.

Roy even said that she felt there was a Punjabi bias in the study of subcontinent division during her PhD.

"The government at the Center has also been treated differently - the Punjab has received much more compensation when it did not understand the problems of the East," she said.

The idea first sprouted during her visit to the Berlin Holocaust Memorial.

" For the first time, I was struck by the enormity of the crimes committed against the Jews. Then it occurred to me that the influence of the installation was much stronger than any other medium, she said.

"The Holocaust and division happened at the same time decade. There are so many Holocaust memorials, why don't we have any public commemoration of Zabor? We have history, writing, literature, movies but where was the public commemoration?" Roy further added.

The Partition Virtual Museum, a joint effort by KPMP AND Architecture Urbanism Research (AUR), is upheld by Tata Steel and will be a free repository for everyone.

The museum will unveiled on 24th of August. It will have a virtual art gallery, an oral history section and an all-year-round archive.