The Government Museum, Egmore: India’s Second-Oldest Treasure House

On Pantheon Road in Egmore, behind a screen of old trees, stands a campus of deep-red buildings that has been collecting the past for well over 170 years. The Government Museum, Chennai — Madras Museum to generations of the city — was founded in 1851, which makes it the second-oldest museum in India after the Indian Museum in Kolkata, and one of the oldest in Asia. It is not a single hall but a whole quarter: six buildings, some forty-six galleries and around sixteen acres, ranging from spotlit bronzes and Buddhist marbles to coins, whale skeletons and a fossilised tree. You could spend an hour here or a whole day, and either way leave having seen something extraordinary.

A museum older than most nations

The museum grew out of a collection handed over by the Madras Literary Society, and its early shape owed much to Edward Balfour, the Scottish surgeon-naturalist who ran it in its formative years and pushed it to become a genuinely public institution. From natural-history cabinets it expanded into archaeology, sculpture, numismatics and anthropology, until it became the great encyclopaedic museum of the south. The complex you visit today, the Government Museum, still keeps that Victorian ambition to gather the whole world under one set of roofs — and it shares its grounds with the Connemara Public Library, one of India’s four legal-deposit libraries, which opened in 1896 and receives a copy of nearly everything published in the country.

Chisholm’s red Indo-Saracenic city

Much of the campus’s drama comes from its architecture. The theatre and several of the halls were designed in the 1870s by Robert Fellowes Chisholm, the British architect who did more than anyone to invent the Indo-Saracenic style — a deliberate fusion of European engineering with the domes, arches and ornament of Mughal and South Indian building. The Museum Theatre, a semicircular hall wrapped in red brick and creamy plaster, is his showpiece, and the surrounding rotundas and arcades carry the same confident blend. Walking between the buildings, past columns and horseshoe arches, is half the pleasure of a visit; the architecture is an exhibit in its own right.

The Bronze Gallery

The single most celebrated thing in the museum is its Bronze Gallery, home to one of the world’s finest collections of South Indian bronzes — some five hundred pieces, most of them from the Chola period between the 9th and 13th centuries, the golden age of the craft. They were made by the lost-wax method, each figure cast solid from a wax model that was then destroyed, so that no two are alike. The hall is kept deliberately dim, and the icons rise out of the dark under focused light. The undisputed star is Nataraja, Shiva as lord of the dance, poised inside a ring of flame with one foot raised — an image Hindu tradition reads as the god dancing the universe into being and out of it again. Beside it stands the Ardhanarishvara, Shiva split down the middle into male and female halves, a serene rendering of a difficult idea. These were living temple images, carried in procession on festival days, and something of that devotional charge still clings to them.

Amaravati marbles, coins and curiosities

Almost as famous, and far older, are the Amaravati sculptures. These greenish-white limestone panels — the ‘Amaravati marbles’ — once sheathed a colossal Buddhist stupa at Amaravati on the Krishna river, and they date from roughly the 2nd century BCE to the 2nd century CE. Carved in swirling, crowded relief, they show scenes from the life of the Buddha and from the Jataka tales, and rank among the great achievements of early Indian art; a large share of what survives is split between this gallery and the British Museum in London. Elsewhere the museum spreads wide: a numismatics gallery tracing Indian coinage from ancient punch-marked pieces through Roman, Chola, Vijayanagara and colonial issues; anthropology and geology halls; and a much-loved natural-history wing with mounted skeletons — a whale, an elephant — fossils and taxidermy that keep the children busy. On the same grounds sits the National Art Gallery, a Chisholm building housing Rajput and Mughal miniatures and paintings by Raja Ravi Varma, though it has often been shut for restoration, so ask on the day.

Visiting

The museum sits in the heart of the city, an easy walk from Egmore railway station and metro and close to plenty of places to eat. It is usually open from about 9.30am to 5pm and closed on Fridays and public holidays, with a modest entry fee and separate tickets for cameras and for the Bronze Gallery; the light on the bronzes is best kept dim, so photography rules there are strict. Give yourself at least a couple of hours, start with the bronzes and the Amaravati hall while you are fresh, and leave time simply to wander the red buildings. To fit it into a wider itinerary, pair it with the other collections in our round-up at /india/tamil-nadu/guides/museums-of-tamil-nadu, and read the deeper backstory of the state’s ancient past at /india/tamil-nadu/guides/keeladi-and-the-sangam-age.