National Museum, New Delhi
200,000 objects, 5,000 years — and it started with a single exhibition in London that Nehru refused to ship back.
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In 1947–48, Indian artefacts went on display at Burlington House in London — the first British-sponsored show to treat them as high art. Nehru pushed to keep them in India, seeding what became this 1949 museum on Janpath. Today it holds 200,000 works, mostly Indian but some foreign, running from the prehistoric era straight through to modern art.
What to look for
- The full prehistoric-to-modern sweep: five thousand years in a single building on Janpath
- The National Museum Institute on the first floor — a working university offering graduate and doctoral degrees in art history, conservation, and museology
On Janpath in central New Delhi; operated by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.
National Museum, New Delhi is one of 35 sights worth the detour in Delhi, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Delhi pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Delhi
- Red FortThe ramparts where Jawaharlal Nehru raised India's flag on 15 August 1947 still host that ceremony every Independence Day.
- Qutb MinarSuccessive dynasties handed this tower off across 170 years — Aibak started it in 1199, Firuz Shah Tughlaq capped it with a cupola in 1368.
- Humayun's TombThe red-sandstone ancestor of the Taj Mahal — commissioned by an empress, designed by Persian architects, and finished a century before Agra.
- Jama MasjidShah Jahan built his imperial mosque at the highest point of Shahjahanabad — the Mughal capital — and it was regarded as a symbolic gesture of Mughal power across India.
- Lotus TempleTwenty-seven marble petals, grouped in threes, fold into a single hall where any person of any faith walks in without condition.
- India GateAround 13,300 names carved in stone — soldiers lost across Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and the Afghan frontier.