This paper examines the role of brick and mortar museum spaces in shaping public memory of conflict through two case studies: Beit Beirut in Beirut, Lebanon, and the Partition Museum in Amritsar, India. Both museums commenced operations in 2017, and have since charted diverging trajectories as institutions engaged in assembling, ordering and displaying national trauma. While Beit Beirut is a reappropriated sniper's den bearing scars of the civil war, the Partition Museum is housed in a colonial-era Town Hall, and is part of a recently developed 'heritage plaza' that includes the Sikh Golden Temple complex and the Jallianwala Bagh, site of an infamous colonial massacre. Both the Lebanese civil war and the partition of India engendered a culture of silence followed by contested memorial practices: in Lebanon, official high-school textbooks did not address the history of the country beyond its liberation from the French mandate in 1943, and despite the provisions for the development of a common national history curriculum in the Ta'if Agreement signed at the conclusion of the war, no such curriculum has yet been implemented with the result that the young post-war generation is still reading textbooks published in the 1970s. Similarly in India, only since the late 1990s has scholarship addressed the lacunae in the official accounts of the partition with regard to gendered ethno-religious violence and charted the changes in narratives of place as demographics shifted between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and those designated refugees and evacuees. In the absence of official commemoration, various other forms of memorialising led by private actors have emerged. For instance, the volunteer-driven 1947 partition archive (http://www.1947partitionarchive.org) collects and disseminates video and audio witness testimonies of the micro-events surrounding the partition, which cannot be accommodated in official historiography. Similarly, the Lebanese oral history project Badna Naaref (We want to know) archived testimonies of the civil war collected by students from 12 schools of greater Beirut between 2010 and 2012. These commemorative practices jostle with the museums-in-progress, and therefore it becomes even more important to investigate the extent to which Beit Beirut and the Partition Museum function as public memory projects, how they conceptualise and display material memories, to what extent this enables visitor engagement, and what this means for the future of contemporary heritage in Lebanon and India.
