Ahmedabad is a city of museums — kite museum, a museum of utensils, a world-class textile museum, toy museum and more. The museum that opened to the public last year, is just a 100 metres away from the famed Calico Museum of Textiles in Shahibaug.
At first, the architecture of this colonial structure draws you in, before the masterpieces inside take over.
The pathway, flanked by well-landscaped lush green lawns and a two-tier fountain, leads you to the 113-year-old mansion, which was once home to the Lalbhai family. Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum is one of the few examples of a house turned into a museum, in the country.
Today, the three buildings in the complex display a collection of traditional and folk art from various schools — Persian, Mughal, Rajput, Pahari and modern and contemporary Indian art.
There is also a small amphitheatre to screen films and intimate performances.
While a part of the collection — particularly manuscripts, archival documents — went to the Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology, an engaging narrative of Indian art’s journey unfolds at Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum. It’s impossible to ignore one of the oldest versions of the ‘Khamsa of Nizami’. This is the illustrated khamsa or the five poems by the 12th-Century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi.
The visitor can flip through the pages of the manuscript on an iPad. Another rare work in the section is 13 episodes (watercolour, 1920) of the Ramayana painted by Nandalal Bose. You can spend hours trying to read postcards sent by students to teachers in Santiniketan from 1913-1940.
Picture Credit : Google