Napier Museum

The Napier Museum is housed in one of the most peculiar buildings in Kerala — a Victorian Gothic structure decorated with striped Moorish arches, polychrome tiles, and ornamental turrets, painted in yellow and black and pink. It should be absurd. Somehow it works, or at least it entertains, and the collection inside is genuinely good.

The ground floor has a strong selection of Kerala bronzes: temple images, ceremonial objects, and ritual vessels spanning several centuries. Upstairs, the collections include ivory carvings, historical models, traditional jewellery, and examples of the intricately carved wooden temple panels that represent one of Kerala's most accomplished craft traditions. The museum sits in the larger grounds of the Thiruvananthapuram park compound, which also contains the zoo and the Sree Chithra Art Gallery — plan a morning or afternoon for all three.

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A story
The building was designed by Robert Fellowes Chisholm and completed in 1880, commissioned to house the art and ethnographic collections of the Travancore royal family. Chisholm invented what he called the Indo-Saracenic style as a conscious attempt to blend Indian and European architectural forms into something suited to the colonial context. The result is extravagant: striped arches, turrets, coloured tiles, and a facade that looks as if it was designed by someone who had read about India rather than lived there, and who found the idea irresistible.

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