Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum

A bliss for art lovers, the Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum displays art and paintings from over thousand years. The housed in a colonial building built in 1905, this museum in Ahmedabad is a must-visit spot for every art and architecture afficionado.

About the Museum

The Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum in Ahmedabad is one of the top tourist attractions and a beautiful place to be. The main building is a colonial house built in 1905, the museum displays Indian art of over a thousand years back. Upon entering the museum, you will find paintings from a range of different traditions and styles, paintings from Mughal, Persian, Deccan, Pahari, and Rajasthani schools, Company School portraits, Tibetan Thangkas, modernist paintings from the Bengal school, and painted postcards from pre-independent India. Artwork in stones, wood, metal and Bidri from a thousand-year-old tradition cover the entire museum.

The buildings adjacent to the museum are Claude Batley house and the Rahul Mehrotra galleries where temporary exhibitions are showcased with displays of work by young artists. Recently the Arvind Indigo Exhibition was displayed here which was the concept of Mr. Sanjay Lalbhai. The exhibition throws light on the indigo dye beyond its use in textiles such as metal, stone, canvas, etc., which resulted in the exhibition ‘Alchemy: explorations in Indigo’. When not used for temporary exhibitions, these buildings are used to display modern art collections of Sanjay Lalbhai and his wife Jayshree Lalbhai.

For visiting the museum, you will need to book your slots in advance at either 10 am 12 pm, 2:30 pm, or 4 pm. Some of the popular artifacts that stand out are Rasamanjari paintings from the 18th century, the 15th-century text of Reeti-Kavyaa stream of Hindi poetry, Basholi painting of the Devi showcasing the Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesha, The Khamsa of Nizami, Bodhisattva Head Gandhara, and Cubist studies by Gaganendranath Tagore. There is also an amphitheater space to the left of the building and a Jain temple that was part of the family estate. The museum has also organized many lecture series on modern art and mythological story-telling sessions for children. The co-owner of the museum Mrs. Jayshree Lalbhai wants the museum to become Ahmedabad’s educational center.