Corpses of battle: Representing the fallen in museum collections

Abstract

Corpses of war are troubling. The fact of death, the feelings of loss, memories of trauma are inherent to corpses of war. The physical war corpse must be left behind or removed, but the memory of the fallen cannot be so easily eradicated. How then are war corpses remembered and how are they imagined and represented in different media and across different spaces of memory? This article focuses on paintings and photographs of battles and conflict in the galleries of the Central Sikh Museum within the Darbar Sahib, one of Sikhism’s most revered shrines. Many of these paintings represent battles fought in defence of the Sikh faith. Given the location of the Museum within the shrine complex, the careful presentation of some key religious ideas of the saint-soldier and of martyrdom, are conveyed through the painted and photographed corpses. The proliferation of painted corpses of medieval battles presents a sharp contrast to their absence in museum images of the 20th century battle, “Operation Bluestar”, an absence which is equally troubling. Based on a visual ethnography of battlefield paintings and photographed corpses of the fallen, I address the act of viewing of battle-scarred corpses as a form of remembrance, but also an act that recreates familiar rituals of mourning in “seeing the face of the dead”.

Keywords

• war
• India
• Sikh
• museum collection
• mourning rituals