Narrating Popular Sikh History in a Museum

Historian Kanika Singh's The Story of a Sikh Museum: Heritage, Politics, Popular Culture is a pioneering, richly researched examination of how Sikh visual culture is constructed through museums and history paintings. The book focuses on the Bhai Mati Das Museum (BMDM) at Gurdwara Sisganj in Old Delhi—one of Sikhism's most significant shrines—and uses it as a lens to understand broader questions of identity, heritage, and political memory in contemporary India.

Singh identifies Sikh museums as a distinctive phenomenon in modern India, remarkable for their sheer numbers, flexible displays, and presence across multiple cultural spheres. Unlike conventional museums that prioritise historical artifacts, the Bhai Mati Das Museum showcases modern realist paintings (or, history paintings) as its primary exhibits. This unconventional approach challenges Western definitions of what a museum should be, revealing how non-Western institutions operate through different logics of memory and representation.

Inside this space, temporal and religious functions merge, transforming the museum from a mere historical archive into a living witness to Sikh political and spiritual memory. The realist paintings depicted there are not neutral illustrations but active agents in shaping how Sikhs perceive and narrate their own past today.

At its core, Singh's book examines how the modern tradition of realist painting has shaped modern Sikh perceptions of history. Through interviews with artists and patrons, access to personal and institutional archives, and critical visual analysis of Sikh popular art, she uncovers the networks of patronage that finance these museums and paintings, such as the Punjab & Sind Bank which commissioned many paintings for their annual calendars ‘from the 1970s to the early 2000s’ that eventually informed the displays at the Bhai Mati Das Museum.

The book reveals a crucial insight: specific versions of the Sikh past are selectively mobilised to make present-day political claims. History paintings become tools for constructing heritage, not simply recording it. This intersection of art, politics, and public memory forms the book's intellectual heart, demonstrating how communities actively imagine and narrate their history rather than passively receiving it. It also allowed the ‘museum’ to assume a distinct functionality, separate from the overlapping roles of the shrine and popular markets or bazaars where prints can be bought. As she concludes after a conversation with one of the artists: ‘…for the artists, history paintings have value and depth not found in mere bazaar art because the former is based on history and takes ‘historical knowledge’ to create.’

Singh's methodology is notably interdisciplinary, bringing together Sikh history, popular art, politics, and museum studies. Her case study approach allows for deep engagement with a single institution while drawing broader conclusions about Sikh museums as a category and their position within a larger cultural world of contestations in the public sphere. The combination of ethnographic interviews, archival research, and visual analysis produces a multifaceted understanding of the space, its strategic value to the community and a critical understanding of its limitations, evasions and silences. Critically speaking, she highlights the political nature of constructing stereotypical antagonists of Sikh heroes and martyrs: such as medieval Muslim rulers; and she points out the silence maintained over more modern, traumatic events in Sikh history, such as the Partition or the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, following the assassination of the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The Story of a Sikh Museum is deeply engaging despite its academic rigour. Singh writes with clarity about complex intersections of faith, art, and power. The book's focus on one museum allows for remarkable depth, though some readers may wish for comparative analysis with other Sikh museums mentioned in the introduction.

The work is essential reading for anyone interested in heritage studies, religious representation, South Asian history, visual culture, or museum studies. It successfully demonstrates that Sikh museums are not neutral repositories but active sites where history is constructed, contested, and mobilised for contemporary purposes. She illuminates broader processes of memory-making that resonate far beyond Sikhism alone, making it a work that will reshape how readers think about museums, heritage, and the powerful role of visual culture in religious and political life.