National Museum

The museum's real strength is breadth rather than any single masterpiece: a documented, ASI-loaned core of Harappan material anchored by the Dancing Girl; one of the largest miniature-painting holdings in the world at close to 17,000 works; a coin collection running continuously from the 6th century BCE to the present; and, in the Aurel Stein material, a Silk Route excavation archive with few equivalents outside China, Britain and Hungary. Weighed against that breadth is thin coverage at the level of conservation and continuous display - only 6-7 percent of roughly 206,000 objects is on view at any time, and named galleries are reported closed for extended periods with no published reopening date.

The National Museum did not begin as a building. It began as an exhibition: the Exhibition of the Art of India and Pakistan, staged by the Royal Academy of Arts at Burlington House, London, over the winter of 1947-48 - arguably the first exhibition the British government itself sponsored that treated Indian artefacts as fine art rather than curiosities. Before the objects went back to their lending museums and private owners, and with Jawaharlal Nehru's backing, it was agreed that a permanent Indian museum should hold them instead. A committee under the former chief justice Sir Maurice Gwyer, with the archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler among its members, had already been asked in 1946 to plan such an institution.

On 15 August 1949, the returned collection went on show in the state rooms of Rashtrapati Bhavan, then still called Government House, formally opened by the governor-general C. Rajagopalachari. For the next six years the National Museum was, in effect, the same travelling exhibition parked in a palace. Ground was broken for a purpose-built museum on Janpath in 1955; when it was finally ready in 1960, Nehru asked that a standing Buddha figure and the Rampurva bull capital stay behind at Rashtrapati Bhavan rather than move with everything else, and they remain there still.

The architect Ganesh Bhikaji Deolalikar designed the building that stands on Janpath today. Nehru laid its foundation stone on 12 May 1955; the vice-president Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan inaugurated the finished building on 18 December 1960. It occupies a plot that Edwin Lutyens had originally marked out for an Imperial Museum, and which had briefly held a small museum devoted to the Central Asian antiquities of Sir Aurel Stein before Deolalikar's building replaced it. The plan was always for an octagon built in phases: the first phase opened in 1960, a second in 1989, and a foundation stone for a third and final phase was laid on 18 December 2017, requiring the demolition of an Archaeological Survey of India building on the site, since relocated to Dharohar Bhawan.

The museum's first director, Grace Morley, had already spent more than two decades founding and running the San Francisco Museum of Art before she took charge in New Delhi in August 1960. She installed the collection in white-cube rooms with minimal labelling, teak pedestals, track lighting and large glass cases on staggered risers - a modernist, uncluttered display language, drawn partly from her American training, that still shapes how the galleries look today. The National Museum Institute of History of Art, Conservation and Museology, founded on the building's first floor in 1983 and a deemed university since 1989, has since begun shifting its main teaching campus to Noida, though its registered office and student access to the collection remain at Janpath.

The museum's most famous single object, the small bronze Dancing Girl from Mohenjo-daro, cannot be separated from the story of how the Harappan material arrived in Delhi at all. Excavators in the 1920s first deposited the Mohenjo-daro finds in the Lahore Museum; Mortimer Wheeler later had them moved to Delhi in anticipation of a Central Imperial Museum. Partition then forced a division of ownership, and the two countries settled on splitting the collection roughly equally - in places literally, with individual necklaces and girdles taken apart so that half their beads went to Pakistan and half stayed in India. The historian Nayanjot Lahiri has written that the integrity of these objects was compromised in the name of an equitable division. Of the two most celebrated figures excavated at Mohenjo-daro, Pakistan asked for and received the steatite 'Priest King'; India kept the Dancing Girl. The museum's Harappan holding - more than 3,500 objects on permanent loan from the Archaeological Survey of India - grew afterward from sites that fell on the Indian side of the border after 1947, among them Rakhigarhi, Daimabad and Dholavira.

The National Museum organises its roughly 206,000 objects into named departments rather than a single chronological sweep, and only about 6-7 percent of the holding is on view at any one time, the rest held in reserve or rotated through temporary display. Archaeology carries sculpture in stone, bronze and terracotta from the Maurya and Shunga dynasties of the 4th-1st century BCE through the Kushana and Gupta periods to the regional courts of the early and late medieval centuries. Numismatics and Epigraphy holds some 130,000 coins in reserve, of which roughly 1,669 are displayed, tracing Indian coinage from 6th-century-BCE punch-marked pieces to the 21st century. Decorative Arts covers ivory, jade, ceramics, metalware, textiles and carved wood from the 16th to the 20th century. Central Asian Antiquities preserves what Sir Aurel Stein carried back from three Silk Route expeditions between 1900 and 1916. Manuscripts holds nearly 14,000 items in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and regional languages; Painting holds close to 17,000 miniatures, one of the largest such collections anywhere; Arms and Armour runs from pre-history to the 19th century; and the Jewellery gallery, named 'Alamkara', spans five thousand years from Harappan bead necklaces to Mughal court jewels. A first-floor Maritime Heritage Gallery, opened in 1991, and departments for Anthropology and Pre-Columbian and Western art round out the building.

The Central Asian Antiquities department is, on its own terms, a colonial-era excavation collection rather than a purchased or donated one. Sir Aurel Stein removed more than 12,000 objects from over a hundred sites along the northern and southern Silk Route during three expeditions in 1900-1901, 1906-1908 and 1913-1916 - wall paintings, painted silk banners depicting Buddhist deities, wood, stucco and terracotta sculpture, coins, textiles, leather and paper documents in a mix of Hellenistic, Sassanian, Uyghur, Chinese, Tibetan and Indian styles, mostly dated from the 3rd to the 12th century CE. The material sits in the museum's collection today as the residue of exactly the kind of early-twentieth-century foreign expedition whose finds are, at other institutions and in other countries, the subject of restitution argument; the National Museum's own published account of the gallery states Stein's role and the dates of his expeditions plainly, without addressing the terms on which the material left Chinese Turkestan for Delhi rather than London or Budapest, where much of the rest of the Stein collections went.

The Janpath building's own future is unresolved. The master plan for the Central Vista Redevelopment Project, the government's overhaul of the administrative core of New Delhi, scheduled the National Museum for demolition, with the site absorbed into new government office buildings. The government's proposed replacement is a museum called Yug Yugeen Bharat, to be built inside the historic North and South Block secretariat buildings on Raisina Hill in collaboration with France; the culture minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat described it in June 2024 as intended to showcase the country's journey and become the world's largest museum by floor area. Critics, writing in The Wire in 2021, pointed out that North and South Block were still recorded in official land-use documents as government office space rather than public or semi-public use, that both are Grade-I listed heritage structures requiring separate conservation approval for any conversion, and that no feasibility or security study for turning working secretariat buildings into a museum near the Prime Minister's residence had been published.

As of a statement to the Lok Sabha on 11 December 2023, the Union Minister for Culture, G. Kishan Reddy, told Parliament that no decision had been taken on the demolition, in response to a question about its rationale. No revised timeline or decision has since appeared on the museum's own site. The practical result, confirmed by the museum's own current visitor page, is that the National Museum on Janpath continues to operate, sell tickets and receive visitors today exactly as it has for decades, with its own eventual fate stated nowhere on that page.

The museum sits on Janpath in the government and diplomatic quarter of New Delhi, a short walk from the Central Secretariat and Udyog Bhawan Metro stations and served by several bus routes that stop directly outside. Entry costs 20 rupees for Indian nationals and 500 rupees for foreign nationals, with free entry for students up to class 12 on production of an identity card; the museum's own site sells timed tickets online as well as at the counter. Opening hours run Tuesday to Friday from 10am to 6pm and Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 8pm, with the museum closed on Mondays and national holidays. Visitor accounts describe a building large enough that a first visit rarely covers everything in one sitting, an on-site cafeteria, and, in recent years, a recurring experience of finding one or more galleries closed for renovation without the closure being flagged in advance - a fact worth planning around rather than a reason not to go.

Visitors consistently describe the National Museum as far larger and more rewarding than a first glance suggests - a genuine full-day museum built around the Harappan and Indus Valley material, the Buddha relics, the bronze and coin galleries and one of the largest miniature-painting collections in the country. Against that, the same body of accounts returns again and again to the state of the building and its staffing: sections closed for renovation without notice on the museum's own channels, thin signage, little visible staff presence to direct visitors, and, in wetter months, visible water damage in stairwells and corridors.