Lakshmipat Singhania Academy

Walter Granville's grand neoclassical Indian Museum of 1875, assumed to have been designed to emulate the British Museum, is at least as handsome as his General Post Office. Perhaps it has even more claim to being considered his best classical composition. This was fitting. Jan Morris writes perceptively, "There was one class of public building in which the British in India truly excelled: the museum. It was the one class of building, too, that the Indian masses treated with reverence... They called a museum a House of Wonder" . Architecturally, as Morris says, this one is "the most important of them all, ... an Italianate palace ... around a colonnaded courtyard". It is a truly gracious building.
Originally founded in 1814, the museum was for a long time not only the oldest such foundation in Asia, but the largest, and it is still the largest in India. But since those early years, much has changed. In recent times, it has not been treated with reverence at all. A huge flyover has been set right in front of it. The "massive simplicity"  of Granville's composition is now best appreciated from inside the courtyard.
The interior of the museum still has many elegant features, with Marshall Wood's statue of a young-looking Queen Victoria (1874) still standing proudly at the top of the impressive stairway. A few other signs of these early years remain.