Mallika Ahluwalia (MBA/MPA 2011)
(illustration by Gisela Goppel)

Mallika Ahluwalia (MBA/MPA-ID 2011)
(illustration by Gisela Goppel)

I’d never thought of myself as someone who would work in a museum. I’ve always been a very mission-motivated person; for most of my early career, that meant social impact, especially as it related to health, education, and the rights of women and children. But in 2016, while I was working in India for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a passion project of mine—what would become the Partition Museum—took on a life of its own.

Partition occurred in August 1947, with the division of British-ruled India into two independent countries: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. It resulted in the displacement of an estimated 15 million people and the deaths of hundreds of thousands—some figures go as high as 2 million. Yet until we created it, there was no museum to learn about this period in history, and nowhere for those affected to record their experiences for the benefit of others. I grew up with my maternal grandparents—the generation that lived through Partition—and saw that many of their friends were dying. History was being lost. I felt a deep need to honor my family’s history and the memories of thousands of others by creating a place for them to tell their stories.

In the beginning, the Partition Museum was just an idea. We had no money, no collection, and no building. I thought it would be something that I could work on alongside my day job. But as we talked to people, it became clear that there was support, and in 2016, the government of the Indian state of Punjab offered a building to house the museum. We set the goal to open 14 galleries in August 2017 for the 70th anniversary of Partition; at that point I knew I needed to quit my job and focus on the museum full-time.

Suddenly I needed to understand climate-control systems and lighting. Then there was the business model and hiring our team. It was a completely mad period of bringing an entire organization to life and raising funds as we went along. But it was something that I really, really felt needed to exist, and in August, we opened on schedule. Since then nearly 500,000 people have visited the museum.

Historically, there’s been a veil of silence over Partition—even if people lost everything, there was the sense of needing to put grief to one side and focus on building a better future in a newly independent country. There was also a great deal of trauma around the violence that people had witnessed and didn’t want to revisit. My father didn’t even know what his mother and her sister had lived through during Partition—that they were locked in the compartment of a train to protect them from the widespread rape of young girls and women. So even in my own family, there was silence.

In addition to some harrowing, heartbreaking stories, the museum highlights more positive stories of humanity—that many people made it to safety because someone helped. One Hindu woman we interviewed kept a Muslim gentleman in her home who didn’t want to migrate to Pakistan. A neighbor found out and accused the woman and her sister of hiding him. But she said, “No. Don’t you know, this is our brother?” It put them at great risk, but they took that risk anyway.

For me, being part of a team that created a space for these stories to be heard and acknowledged—to create a dialogue—was a new form of social impact. I’ve also grown a lot as a leader, in terms of building a team from scratch and creating a culture and organization that’s very clear about what it wants to accomplish and why. Yet there was nothing in my career path that indicated I would find myself where I am today. Sometimes you don’t know what the future will bring. This experience has taught me to be open to that fact.

Mallika Ahluwalia (MBA/MPA-ID 2011) is executive director of the Partition Museum in Amritsar, India. Last year, the museum won the Media, Arts & Culture Award at the UK-India Awards; in 2017, it received a National Excellence Award by Condé Nast Traveller India, and the ASEAN-India award in the tourism sector.

Post a Comment