Museum · London, United Kingdom
Victoria and Albert Museum
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.
See first
- Tipu's Tiger, the automaton made for Tipu Sultan
- The wine cup of Shah Jahan
- Indian textiles: chintz, muslin, gold-thread embroidery
- Mughal portraits and paintings
- The online collection, while the gallery is shut
In 1879–80 the holdings of the East India Company’s India Museum were divided between the V&A and the British Museum. Today the V&A’s South and South-East Asian collection is described as the most comprehensive in the West: nearly 60,000 objects, about 10,000 of them textiles and 6,000 paintings.
The best-known piece is Tipu’s Tiger, an automaton made around 1795 for Tipu Sultan of Mysore that shows a tiger attacking a near life-size European, with works inside that make him wail and the tiger grunt. Close behind are the white jade wine cup of Shah Jahan, dated 1657, Mughal and Maratha portraits, jade cups and jewelled spoons, and textiles of every kind, from dyed cotton chintz to embroidery in gold and silver thread, with carpets from Agra and Lahore.
Plan around one fact. The South Asia gallery at South Kensington, last redesigned in the 1990s, is closed for refurbishment and due to reopen in spring 2028. The new gallery will include a restored nineteenth-century temple ceiling from Cochin, its missing panels remade by Devi Seetharam and Ananth Ramaswamy.
Until then, the online collection is the way in.
