Museums and Galaries

National Railway Museum

This is a small museum of railway memorabilia, including the skull of an elephant killed when it collided with a mail train in Bengal, in 1894. But the principal glory of the National Railway Museum is the open-air display of old steam locomotives and rolling stock. Particularly interesting are the ‘special’ carriages belonging to British and Indian grandees, such as the Viceregal dining car, the Maharaja of Mysore's personal train, which comprised both sleeping and day compartments, and the Gaekwar of Baroda’s Saloon, with its ornate gold and enamel ceiling. Also on display is the last steam engine to see service on the Indian railways – as recently as 1995 – and the first electric-powered engine to do so – as long ago as the 1930s.

Crafts Museum

Crafts Museum is located near Purana Quilla on the Bhairon Road. You can include a visit to Crafts Museum on your tour of Purana Quilla. The Museum was designed by Charles Correa and is quite popular among the lovers of Indian art and craft. The Crafts Museum displays various objects from different parts of India. The Tribal and Rural Craft Gallery is a treasure house of beautiful crafted objects from Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Nagaland. The Crafts Museum also has a village complex dedicated to the architecture of village houses.

Gandhi Memorial Museum

Adjacent to Raj Ghat is the Gandhi Memorial Musuem, where the visitor can see a fascinating display of photographs illustrating the Mahatma’s life and death. There is a large collection of Gandhi memorabilia, from toothpicks to spinning wheels, via the clothes he was supposedly wearing at his assassination. Among the bons mots about Gandhi, which are inscribed on the walls, is G.B. Shaw’s reflection that the Mahatma’s murder ‘shows how dangerous it is to be too good.’

National Gallery of Modern Art

The National Gallery of Modern Art contains a large collection of 20th-century Indian art. There are examples of the work of the painters of the Bengali Renaissance and of the poet and artist, Tagore.The highlight is the room devoted to the pictures of female Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941), whose portraits – more successful than her genre scenes – are painted with the confident bravura of the youthful Augustus John. The galleries recently have been reorganized to accommodate a program of biannual exhibitions designed to bring a larger proportion of the 15,000-piece collection before the public. The museum is in Jaipur House – by any yardstick, a grandee’s townhouse – formerly the Delhi residence of the Maharaja of Jaipur.

National Science Centre

National Science Centre located at Pragati Maidan, near Gate No. 1 is dedicated to inculcate awareness about science and technology. Those interested in astronomy can head to Nehru Planetarium, which is located in Teen Murti House. The planetarium holds special film shows on the solar system in English and Hindi. Apart from the above mentioned museums, Delhi has a number of other museums that you can visit on your tour of Delhi. Some of the museums that you may like to travel to include Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum, Sanskriti Museum of Indian Terracottta, National Philatelic Museum and Doll Museum.

Tibet House Museum

The Tibet House Museum on Lodi Road has a fine collection of tankhas, jewellery and ritual objects. En route to Old Delhi are the Shankar's Dolls Museum of Archeology related to the Mughal era, and the Museum of Arms and Weapons which traces the development of arms from the Mughal age to the First World War.

Shankar's International Dolls Museum Delhi

The International Dolls Museum is exactly what its name implies, it is a museum devoted to a display of dolls from all over India and abroad. On view are dolls dressed in national costumes, each exquisitely Grafted and embellished.There are indigenous rural dolls made by local craftsmen, sophisticated dolls machine made at factories, in fact a magical collection that will delight children as well as enthrall the adult.