Calico Museum of Textiles

The Calico Museum was inspired by the great art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, who in conversations with the industrialist Gautam Sarabhai during the 1940s urged the founding of a textile institute in Ahmedabad, a centre of the subcontinent's textile trade since the fifteenth century. In 1949 Gautam Sarabhai and his sister Gira Sarabhai, with the house of Calico, founded the museum, and it was inaugurated by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Originally housed within the Calico Mills, it moved in the early 1980s to the Sarabhai family estate in Shahibag, and grew into what is widely regarded as the finest textile museum in the world, run by the Sarabhai Foundation.

The museum occupies The Retreat, the Sarabhai family estate in Shahibag, centred on Sarabhai-ni-Haveli, a mansion with formal gardens and water features designed in the 1930s by Surendranath Kar of Shantiniketan for Ambalal and Sarladevi Sarabhai. The grand residence, set in botanically rich gardens, was adaptively reused to display the collection: the Haveli holds religious and royal textiles, while other pavilions show everyday cloth, and access is by guided tour only to protect the fragile textiles.