Neither India nor Pakistan conducted an official inquiry into the violence of 1947, and neither has an official register of the dead or the displaced. For fifty years the only records were family memory.
The 1947 Partition Archive, founded in 2010, recorded several thousand oral histories from survivors on three continents before the generation was gone. The Partition Museum opened at Amritsar in 2017, in the old Town Hall, the first museum anywhere devoted to it, built largely on donated objects and testimony.
The literature did the work the archives did not. Saadat Hasan Manto's Toba Tek Singh and Khol Do, Amrita Pritam's Aj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu and Pinjar, Rajinder Singh Bedi's Lajwanti, Bhisham Sahni's Tamas, Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan.
Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence, 1998, was an influential oral history of Partition from the Indian side and made the recovery of women, the killing of women by their own families, and the silence of survivors into subjects that could be discussed.
The survivors were in their eighties and nineties when the recording began in earnest. Most of what happened in Punjab in 1947 was never told to anyone, and now cannot be.
It was built by a private trust with the Punjab government providing the building, and it opened on 17 August, the day the boundary award was made public in 1947. India now marks 14 August as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, declared in 2021, seventy four years after the fact.
It is built on oral testimony, objects brought across and donated by families, and documents, and it is a private trust rather than a government institution.
A second was opened at Delhi. That two museums exist, both recent and both private, is the measure of how the two states have handled the memory of it.