The mere decision to open the museum, the first devoted to the partition, was fraught. For decades, a project of this kind was hard to imagine. Discussion of partition was left largely to academia.

Some witnesses interviewed for the exhibits went most of their lives without telling their own children that they had fled across the new border. Few wanted to revisit those months of mayhem, kidnap, rape and murder, when neighbor turned on neighbor, mobs set trains carrying refugees on fire and many hands were bloody.

And there was little encouragement for survivors to talk about what happened, said Faisal Devji, a professor of Indian history at the University of Oxford.

“In the early years of independence,” he said, “the governments of India and Pakistan discouraged any recounting of partition’s violence, both so as to protect the religious minorities who might be blamed for it and to place a positive halo around the achievement of freedom.”