APRIL - DECEMBER 2026
Heritage Walk
Amritsar
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Three monumental sculptures by India’s most celebrated artists, installed across the sacred city.
Three Stations. Three Artists.
One City.
From the Partition Museum to Le Méridien, this walk threads through Amritsar's most resonant spaces, pausing at each station to encounter a sculpture that speaks to the city's layered identity. Memory, rootedness, and transformation: three meditations on what it means to belong, to endure, and to reimagine.
I
PARTITION MUSEUM, TOWN HALL
Krishen Khanna
MEMORY AND THE WORKING HAND
Retired Captain Ramesh Kumar Accordion Wale
Resinated Fibreglass with Automotive Paint
100 x 65 x 76 inches
The Heritage Walk begins with Krishen Khanna’s celebrated Bandwalla, a musician hired to create joy but never permitted to participate in it. The ceremonial musician becomes a figure of invisible labour, quiet dignity, and the complexity of belonging being suspended between spectacle and exclusion.
Khanna, himself shaped by the dislocations of Partition, brings to the figure an acute sense of presence touched by loss. Here, the sculpture’s white recalls both the marble luminosity of Amritsar’s sacred architecture and the still hush of a city that carries the memory of 1947. At the Partition Museum, it becomes an elegiac sentinel for the walk that follows.
The walk begins here. Memory, once witnessed, becomes the ground you walk on.
PRESENTED BY
II
WELCOMHOTEL by ITC HOTELS, AMRITSAR
Thota Vaikuntam
ROOTEDNESS AND RURAL DIGNITY
Untitled
Resinated Fibreglass with Automotive Paint
103 × 48 × 33 inches
Vaikuntam’s figures are not decorative. They are declarative. His bold, larger-than-life depictions of rural women command the grand spaces of ITC with a quiet authority that mirrors the hotel’s own deep commitment to Indian heritage and craft.
In Amritsar, where seva (service) is not a transaction but a spiritual calling, where the langar feeds thousands daily and hospitality is an act of faith, Vaikuntam’s women carry resonant weight. They celebrate the agrarian identity that continues to sustain this city, even as urbanization accelerates around it. The viewer encounters here something affirmative: the rootedness that survived, the land that endured, and the women who held communities together across every fracture.
Where Khanna asks us to remember, Vaikuntam asks us to stand firm. This is where grief gives way to groundedness.
PRESENTED BY
III
LE MÉRIDIEN AMRITSAR
Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi
TRANSFORMATION AND THE MODERN SELF
The 41 Resurrection Lives
Fibreglass
91 × 72 × 16 inches
The walk concludes at Le Méridien Amritsar with PNC and with a question turned inward. Where Khanna asked us to witness, Vaikuntam asked us to be rooted, Chaturvedi asks us to transform.
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His winged men, businesspeople caught between ambition and transcendence, bearing the wings of a radiant butterfly is brutally honest examination of modern identity: the desire to rise and the fear of losing oneself in the ascent. In Amritsar, a city of pilgrimage and perpetual arrival where the Golden Temple reminds every visitor that the journey inward is as essential as any outward movement. PNC’s work resonates as both challenge and benediction. His fiberglass winged figure, placed in the contemporary and architecturally striking space of Le Méridien, become totems for a city always in motion.
PNC’s work at Le Méridien is where the walk releases you: transformed, aspiring, awake. The viewer who began at the Partition Museum in the company of Khanna’s labouring musicians ends here, wings outstretched, asking where the journey leads next.​
PRESENTED BY
