April – December 2026

Heritage Walk, Amritsar

Three Stations. Three Artists. One City.

Three monumental sculptures by three of India’s most celebrated artists, installed across the sacred 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.

  1. IKrishen KhannaPartition Museum, Town Hall
  2. IIThota VaikuntamWelcomhotel by ITC Hotels, Amritsar
  3. IIIPhaneendra Nath ChaturvediLe Méridien Amritsar
Krishen Khanna, Retired Captain Ramesh Kumar Accordion Wale: seated bandwalla in a white uniform and cap playing an accordion, resinated fibreglass with automotive paint
Krishen Khanna · Retired Captain Ramesh Kumar Accordion Wale

I Memory and the Working Hand

Krishen Khanna

Partition Museum, Town Hall

Title
Retired Captain Ramesh Kumar Accordion Wale
Medium
Resinated fibreglass with automotive paint
Dimensions
100 × 65 × 76 in

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, 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.

Thota Vaikuntam’s standing figure of a Telangana woman playing the flute, in a red sari with green bangles, cordoned by a red rope at Welcomhotel by ITC Hotels, Amritsar
Thota Vaikuntam · Untitled

II Rootedness and Rural Dignity

Thota Vaikuntam

Welcomhotel by ITC Hotels, Amritsar

Title
Untitled
Medium
Resinated fibreglass with automotive paint
Dimensions
106 × 58 × 81 in

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 urbanisation 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.

Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi, The 41 Resurrection Lives: fibreglass figure of a man in a black suit with large blue-and-black butterfly wings, standing on a white plinth
Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi · The 41 Resurrection Lives

III Transformation and the Modern Self

Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi

Le Méridien Amritsar

Title
The 41 Resurrection Lives
Medium
Fibreglass
Dimensions
91 × 72 × 16 in

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.

His winged men – businesspeople caught between ambition and transcendence, bearing the wings of a radiant butterfly – are a 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 fibreglass winged figure, placed in the contemporary and architecturally striking space of Le Méridien, becomes a totem 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.

Amritsar

The route

  1. Krishen KhannaPartition Museum, Town Hall
  2. Thota VaikuntamWelcomhotel by ITC Hotels, Amritsar
  3. Phaneendra Nath ChaturvediLe Méridien Amritsar

Partners

Public Art Initiative