Ultimately, the story of the Punjabi Psalter perhaps teaches us a simple yet profoundly important lesson: Heritage is not always what we already know. Sometimes, heritage is what we have simply stopped looking at.
The special exhibition taking place in Washington may not be placing the Punjabi Psalter permanently on a museum wall, but it certainly offers an opportunity to hear a forgotten voice once again. Perhaps the real achievement will be if that voice travels from Washington back to Punjab.
From an old book lying somewhere in an archive,
from a melody preserved in the memory of an elderly person, from an old manuscript kept by a family,
or from a young person’s question: “What is the Punjabi Psalter, and why have we never heard about it before?”
Perhaps searching for the answer to this question is the beginning of rediscovering our own literary history.
