India’s first Partition Museum opens 70 years after the Radcliffe line came into effect, dividing Amritsar from Lahore, Chittagong from Kolkata, India from Pakistan, and turning the moment of independence from colonial rule into a bloody massacre. Nearly 15 million crossed this imaginary line, Hindus and Sikhs fleeing to India, Muslims to Pakistan. For 70 years, that border has run through us, and within us.

Through 5,000 personal objects donated by those displaced by Partition letters and manuscripts, a coat salvaged from ruin, a refugee registration card the museum aims to acknowledge the momentous loss of life and amity in 1947, especially in Punjab, which neither India nor Pakistan have quite looked in the eye. ____________Hindus had slaughtered Muslims, Muslims Hindus, in a carnage of spectacular proportions. India, as a republic in the making, a secular nation where all citizens were equal, could not bear to remember the violence that midwifed its freedom.