Book Description

Demand for a National Museum of India was first voiced on 26th July 1837 by Sir James Princep, then Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, in a Memorandum to the east India Company. But it was not until 15th August 1949 that the National Museum was set up. it was started at the Rashtrapati Bhawan with a nucleus of about five hundred collections from an exhibition of Art of India and Pakistan, displayed at the Burlington House London, immediately after Independence. The Museum shifted to its new building on 18th December 1960. The Museum has now more than two hundred thousand collections, some of them rarest of the rare, but hardly for percent of the collections are displayed. Not more than hundred fifty thousand people visit the Museum annually, compared to nearly 60 million visitors to the Louvre in Paris and 50 million to the British Museum of London.