Prime Minister Museum

One museum for every Prime Minister of India since 1947, in New Delhi — a building that has to hold schoolchildren and heads of state on the same afternoon, and give each leader a room without turning the whole into a corridor of portraits.

A corridor you walk in order.

The spine of the museum is a single long passage under a tricolour canopy. Visitors meet one Prime Minister at a time, in sequence, so the building itself tells the story of the office before any gallery does. Portraits face you at eye level; the leaders’ own words sit beside them on the walls.

Off the spine, each gallery changes its mood to its subject: wood and light for one era, screens and sound for another. Guides stand at the thresholds; planting softens the floor so the passage reads as a walk rather than a hall.