Tucked inside the sprawling premises of Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, the Baba Baghel Singh Sikh Heritage Multimedia Museum offers more than a tour through Sikh history. Through paintings, murals, digital projections, books and audio narratives, it presents stories of the Gurus, Sikh martyrs and the evolution of the faith while raising a larger question: how does a community remember its past?The museum, renovated and reopened as a multimedia space in 2014 by Rajya Sabha MP Vikramjit Singh Sahney, traces Sikh history from Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind Singh and touches upon important episodes and figures from the 18th century. It can be accessed through Gate No 1 of Gurdwara Bangla Sahib.On Thursday, DAG Delhi organised a walkthrough of the museum as part of its “City as a Museum” programme, led by historian Kanika Singh and artist Arpana Caur, whose works are also displayed in the museum. The museum is significant not only for the stories it tells but also for the way those stories have travelled beyond its walls. “Why is a museum object in all these places? But I could also flip the question. If something is already part of our everyday lives, why is it in a museum?” she asked during the walkthrough.The question came alive through the museum’s paintings of figures such as Banda Singh Bahadur and Guru Nanak, and its depictions of the younger Sahibzadas. Singh pointed out that several of these images are not rare historical artefacts. Many have appeared for decades in books, calendars, pamphlets, videos, popular art and, more recently, on the internet.A painting of Banda Singh Bahadur, for instance, exists in several forms across Sikh visual culture. An image painted by Kirpal Singh in 1950s has been reproduced in books and memorials and was also seen at the farmers’ protest at Tikri in 2021. “This is how you constitute memory, historical memory,” Singh said, explaining how repeated images become the visual templates through which communities imagine historical figures.Among the institutions that played a role in this visual tradition was Punjab and Sind Bank, which began issuing calendars on Sikh history in the 1970s. Themes ranged from Sikh Gurus as children to women in Sikh history and episodes from Gurbani.Such images, Singh said, gradually become part of everyday memory. The most recognisable visual representation of Guru Nanak, painted by Sobha Singh in the 1900s, is one such example.