The Central Sikh Museum at the entrance to the Golden Temple complex was established in 1958 by the SGPC and holds paintings, weapons, manuscripts and coins.
Its most striking holding is a gallery of martyrdom paintings, showing the eighteenth-century executions in detail: the wheel, the scalping, the sawing, the boiling, the bricking up.
The decision to depict these directly, rather than to abstract them, is deliberate and old. The same images circulate as prints in gurdwaras and homes across the world.
The museum has continued to add portraits, including of those killed in the twentieth century, and the selection of who is added has been contested at various points.
It is a museum whose main function is to make a visitor to the holiest site in Sikhism walk past a room full of paintings of people being killed before they reach it, and that sequence is the argument.
The museum is on the first floor of the clock tower entrance to the complex and most of the people who pass under it do not know it is there.
It is largely a painting collection: portraits of the Gurus, the martyrs, the sardars and the twentieth century figures, commissioned over decades in a consistent style.
It holds weapons, manuscripts and personal effects as well. There is no published catalogue and no conservation programme that has been described publicly.