War museum, Amritsar, Punjab

Abstract

The museum has such a paradoxical situation: they were founded upon the wish to document the past to keep it as protective experience, though instead of serving the present they serve the very same past as a continuation of it. The museum concept is a derivation of the ruling power structure because of its conditions and its public on side and its curator on the other. Conservation and communication are the fundaments of museum. The primary objective of the war museum is to sate the layman curiosity about the life of a soldier by audio-visual, galleries, memorials, displays, etc. It makes a civilian nation conscious under whose protection they flourish. The museums and memorials carry message of nationalism and national identity. A second type of memorial focuses on individual. These monuments suggest that the individual can make a difference and that one‘s contribution to the society is worthy of memorialization. Monuments and memorials are imbued with social, cultural and political meaning that speaks of the past and present. They are imbued with social, cultural and political meaning that speak of the past and present. They are not merely ornamentation features in the urban cape, but are highly visible signifiers that confer meaning and thus concretize the politics of power.