Where to see it
Museums, collections and art towns, by city. What to see first in each.
Bengaluru
A private museum on Kasturba Road holding more than 20,000 works from the twelfth century to now. It treats photography, textiles and popular culture as seriously as painting.
The southern branch of the national gallery, in a restored mansion on Palace Road. About 500 works on show, from miniatures to post-independence painting.
Bolpur
Santiniketan
Art districtThe university town Rabindranath Tagore built in Birbhum, about 150 km north of Kolkata, inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2023. Its sculpture, murals and houses are art in the open.
Chandigarh
Government College of Art, Chandigarh
Art schoolAn art college that traces its line to Lahore's Mayo School of Art, founded in 1875 and re-formed in India after Partition. It sits in Le Corbusier's cultural complex beside the city museum.
Chennai
Started in 1851, the second-oldest museum in India, spread over six buildings in Egmore. Its bronzes and its sculpture from the Amaravati stupa are the reasons to go.
Cleveland
Cleveland Museum of Art
MuseumA museum in Ohio with a dedicated department of Indian and Southeast Asian art and free general admission. It owns the Tuti-nama painted for Akbar around 1560.
Hyderabad
Salar Jung Museum
MuseumOne family's collection, mostly one man's, given to the nation and opened in 1951. Indian miniatures, ivory, jade and textiles alongside European marble and clocks.
Jodhpur
Mehrangarh Museum
MuseumA museum inside the fort above Jodhpur, the seat of the Marwar rulers. It keeps their painting, palanquins, howdahs, turbans and furniture within the palaces that used them.
Kolkata
The first public museum in an Indian university, opened at the University of Calcutta in 1937. It collects the art of Bengal: terracotta, folk painting, scrolls and kantha.
Indian Museum, Kolkata
MuseumFounded in 1814, the oldest museum in India and among the largest. The art and archaeology galleries hold collections of international importance.
Jorasanko Thakur Bari
Artist homeThe Tagore family house in north Kolkata, where Rabindranath was born in 1861. Now the Rabindra Bharati Museum, with galleries for the family and for the Bengal School.
Victoria Memorial Hall
MuseumA white marble memorial on the Maidan, built between 1906 and 1921 and now a museum. Its paintings record how India was seen, and staged, in the colonial era.
London
British Museum
MuseumRoom 33 holds the museum's main display of Asian art, including sculpture from across the Indian subcontinent. Next door are the Amaravati reliefs.
Nearly 60,000 objects from South and South-East Asia, including about 10,000 textiles and 6,000 paintings. Its South Asia gallery is closed for refurbishment until spring 2028.
Mumbai
Mumbai's main museum, opened in 1922 as the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India. About 50,000 objects across art, archaeology and natural history.
Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum
MuseumMumbai's oldest museum, opened in 1872 as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bombay. A museum of the city's decorative arts and history, in a restored Victorian building.
Kala Ghoda
Art districtA crescent of South Mumbai streets holding the city's main museum, its best-known public gallery and the national gallery's Mumbai branch. It hosts the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival each February.
The Mumbai branch of the national gallery, in the Sir Cowasji Jehangir Hall at the edge of Kala Ghoda. It works mostly through exhibitions, from the national collection and from elsewhere.
Sir J. J. School of Art
Art schoolFounded in 1857, the oldest art school in Mumbai, now part of a deemed university. Its neo-Gothic campus has trained painters, sculptors and designers for more than 160 years.
New Delhi
A private museum of modern and contemporary Indian art, opened in 2010. Its collection runs from Raja Ravi Varma to artists still early in their careers.
The national collection of modern Indian art, kept in a former maharaja's house on the India Gate circle. Its holdings across three branches run to about 17,000 works, the earliest from around 1857.
Three small museums in an artists' village on the southern edge of Delhi: everyday art, Indian terracotta and textiles. Set in eight acres of garden at Anandagram.
New York
Indian sculpture and painting across two departments, Asian Art and Islamic Art. It holds most of the Shah Jahan Album, one of the great collections of Mughal painting.
Prayagraj
Allahabad Museum
MuseumA national museum in Prayagraj, established in 1931 and declared an Institution of National Importance in 1985. Known for its rock-art gallery and nineteen canvases by Nicholas Roerich.
Santiniketan
Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati
Art schoolThe art school Rabindranath Tagore founded at Santiniketan in 1919. Under Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij it gave Indian modern art one of its main directions.
Udaipur
The palace of the Mewar rulers on Lake Pichola, built over nearly four centuries, part of it a museum since 1974. The reason to go is Mewar painting, shown in the rooms it was made for.
Vadodara
Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda
Art schoolThe art faculty of the Maharaja Sayajirao University, set up after the university's founding in 1949. Its teachers and students shaped much of Indian modern art from the 1950s on.
Varanasi
Bharat Kala Bhavan
MuseumThe university museum of Banaras Hindu University, with more than 100,000 objects. Strong in miniature painting, sculpture and brocade textiles.
Washington, D.C.
Freer Gallery of Art
MuseumWith the adjoining Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art. Its Mughal painting includes Bichitr's portrait of Jahangir preferring a Sufi to kings.