Government Museum and Art Gallery

Chandigarh's Government Museum and Art Gallery holds a notable collection inherited in part from the pre-Partition Lahore Museum, including Gandhara-era Buddhist sculpture, miniature paintings from various regional schools, and a broader collection of Indian art spanning many centuries. Its calm, uncrowded galleries offer a useful counterpoint to the city's Modernist civic architecture, tracing a much older thread of subcontinental art history.

Sculpture galleries display stone carvings dating back nearly two thousand years, while separate sections cover Pahari and Mughal miniature painting traditions, decorative arts and a small but well-curated selection of contemporary Indian work. The museum sits within the same Sector 10 cultural complex as several other institutions, making it easy to combine with a wider half-day exploring Chandigarh's art and heritage offerings beyond its planned gardens and government buildings.

Established in 1968, following the division of the original Lahore Museum's collection between India and Pakistan after Partition, with Chandigarh inheriting a significant portion of the shared heritage collection — a rare case of a museum's founding collection being determined directly by a national border redrawing.

In Sector 10, central Chandigarh, easily reached by road.