Description:
The museum is laid out on three floors with a small circular garden in the middle. The exhibition rooms lie off a circular corridor. You start on the ground floor with the oldest exhibits and work your way round and then up the stairs. Temporary exhibitions tend to be on the upper floors. The layout isn't entirely logical and it's easy to miss some rooms if you aren't paying attention. When rooms are undergoing renovation (and it seems like renovating the museum is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge) the access can be confused so it's worth keeping an eye on the floor plan that you'll receive with your ticket. At the moment the ground floor is about 80-90% open whilst the first and second floors have more areas that are closed.

Some of the renovated rooms are cooled whilst many of the older rooms are relying on noisy fans for patchy cooling. Whilst this wouldn't be an issue in the winter time, it does make the museum sticky in the height of summer. You may want to take a fan with you - I know it sounds daft but getting hot and bothered could get in the way of your enjoyment of the museum.

There are toilets on each floor. There's a gift shop on the first floor which has a few interesting books and odds and ends of gifts but nothing that's really strongly linked to the exhibitions. There's another 'publications' store on the ground floor behind the ticket window which sells academic pamphlets about the collection as well as some absolutely dreadful plaster cast facsimiles of articles in the collection. There's a vegetarian cafeteria on the top floor.

The easiest way to avoid missing anything is to try to follow the audio tour circuit - if you find all the numbers then you won't miss anything important. The audio tour does a good job of picking out some of the most important pieces in the collection but there will be times when you'll question why some of the items are included. You can skip anything you aren't interested in - just pick the numbers of the items that you want to know about.

The tour starts in the central corridor in front of the statue of Vishnu and then leads into the pre-history section. There are 55 stops on the tour but not all of them will be in the open galleries. Good news about the commentary - the narrator doesn't go on for too long about anything.

Your tour starts with my favourite section - the one on Harappan Civilisation. Now I'm not generally very interested in really old stuff and have seen so many flint axes and oil lamps in my time that they leave me cold. However, the Harappan exhibition got me totally fired up. In part this was because I knew nothing about the Indus Valley cultures despite them existing for longer than the Romans, Egyptians or Ancient Greeks. The first cities excavated back in the 1920s were Harappa and Mohenjodaro and I just don't know why these cities aren't more famous. Actually, I'll take a crack at an explanation - much of the area covered by the Indus Valley cities now lies in Pakistan which falls a little short of most people's ideal holiday destinations.

Anyway, back to how amazingly clever these folk were. The civilisation dates back to earlier than 2700 BC and was very sophisticated. They cast exquisite bronze figurines - the most famous is a tiny dainty dancing girl - carved detailed human busts, made lots of cute little animal figurines that must have been for decorative purposes, threw pots on a wheel, made toys and statues of ladies kneading bread and doing their chores. They also had a sophisticated system of weights and measures that were standardised across a wide geographic area. That sort of stuff just fries my brain. They also have a skeleton in a shallow grave complete with beautiful pots to help her into the next work.

After you leave the Harappan gallery you enter a series of galleries with sculptures made from stone and bronze covering the Mauryan period (3rd Century BC)the Sunga Period (2nd Century BC), the Gandhara period, the Gupta period (4th - 6th C AD) on through medieval carvings and so on. The ages don't mean a lot to me but I love the figures and can appreciate them without necessarily understanding them.

Also on the ground floor are examples of late medieval art, Buddhist art (including relics of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha), a fabulous collection of Indian miniature paintings, and a couple of rooms of general decorative arts including a stunning ivory miniature palace. There's a bizarre collection of transparencies on the evolution of Indian scripts and coins that holds no appeal to me whatsoever and finally some fantastic jewellery

The galleries on the first floor include special temporary exhibition space, lots of manuscripts, two rooms of central Asian antiquities, Coins, more paintings, a section on Maritime heritage and quite a lot of office space.
The highlight on the second floor is the renovated section on arms and armour. Being a girlie I'm not big on the whole 'dressing up to go out and kill people' vibe but I do enjoy the costumes, especially for the horses and elephants.

This floor also has galleries of decorative art and textiles, some tribal costumes from the north eastern parts of India and some interesting musical instruments. If you've got this far without flagging, it's probably time for a cup of tea in the cafeteria.

There's a programme of special exhibitions and these can be quite variable in quality and interest. When I visited in November 2005 there was a splendid exhibition on the textile trade between India and Europe - full of great old chintzes and exploring the influence of Indian fabrics on European fashions. In June 2006 the 'special' was an exhibition called 'in the Footsteps of the Buddha' or something like that. Frankly it was full of photographs, very few actual exhibition pieces and worth a five minute look at most.

You'll probably have realised that the bulk of my favourite areas are on the ground floor. Perhaps I start to lose the will to pay attention on the higher floors or maybe I'm just 'culture fatigued' after the ground floor - I can't give you a good explanation.

In theory there is disabled access but I'm not sure where the special entrance is. The main entrance has a lot of steps plus the security gate to get through and I'd double they'd be easy to manage in a wheelchair. If you need help, I'd suggest to ask the guys at the baggage store and I'm sure they'll point you in the right direction.

By Indian terms it's a bit pricey but I really do recommend this nice little museum as well worth a look and I hope that if you get the chance you'll go and explore for a couple of hours - you could be very surprised by some of the treasures inside.
Close