Partition Museum
Dara Shukoh Library
Testimony from 1947, housed in the seventeenth-century library of a prince who lost his own succession.
The building was Dara Shukoh's library — the Mughal prince who translated the Upanishads and lost the throne, and his life, to Aurangzeb. It was later refaced as a British residency and then a college, so its façade is Palladian and its bones are Mughal. Since 2023 it has held Delhi's Partition Museum.
The museum is built from testimony rather than treasure: recorded voices, photographs, and objects people carried across a new border — a key, a shawl, a set of scales. Delhi received hundreds of thousands of refugees in 1947 and lost a comparable number of its residents, and the city that came out the other side is largely the one outside the door. The galleries end by saying so.
- 01The oral historiesRecorded voices of people who made the crossing, listened to through headphones in near-dark.
- 02Objects carried acrossWhat families chose to take when they had minutes to choose — mostly small, mostly useless, mostly kept.
- 03The building itselfA Mughal prince's library behind a colonial façade, on the Kashmere Gate campus.
Closed Mondays. Allow ninety minutes; the last gallery is heavier than visitors usually expect.