Government Museum, Chennai

The museum was first proposed by the Madras Literary Society in 1846, and Sir Henry Pottinger, the Governor, secured the sanction of the East India Company's Court of Directors in London. In January 1851 Dr Edward Balfour was appointed its first officer in charge, and the opening of the Madras Government Museum was announced in the Fort St George Gazette in April 1851, making it the second oldest museum in India after the Indian Museum in Kolkata. Sited in the historic Pantheon complex in Egmore, it grew over 175 years into one of the largest museums in South Asia, its bronze gallery becoming a place of pilgrimage for scholars of Chola art.

The museum occupies a sixteen-acre campus in Egmore of six independent buildings and some forty-six galleries, several in the Indo-Saracenic style. Its landmark Museum Theatre, built by the British in 1896 on the model of the Globe Theatre in London, is a rare semicircular Indo-Saracenic building reached by a grand flight of granite steps. The National Art Gallery, housed in the former Victoria Technical Institute of 1909, is another fine Indo-Saracenic structure, its galleries fitted in 2001 with the first fibre-optic lighting system in an Indian museum.