About Salar Jung Museum Hyderabad
The Salar Jung Museum is an art museum located at Dar-ul-Shifa, on the southern bank of the Musi River in the city of Hyderabad, Telangana, India. It is one of the three National Museums of India.
It has a collection of sculptures, paintings, carvings, textiles, manuscripts, ceramics, metallic artifacts, carpets, clocks, and furniture from Japan, China, Burma, Nepal, India, Persia, Egypt, Europe, and North America. The museums collection was sourced from the property of the Salar Jung family, after whom it is named. It is one of the largest museums in the world. A nobleman of the Salar Jung family of Hyderabad, Nawab Mir Yousuf Ali Khan, Salar Jung III (1889–1949) served as Prime Minister of Hyderabad during the Nizams rule. He spent a substantial amount of his income, over a period thirty-five years, collecting artifacts from all across the world.
After the Nawab died in 1949, the collections were left behind in his ancestral palace Diwan Devdi.
The collection was formerly exhibited there as a private museum, named Salar Jung Museum, which was inaugurated by Jawaharlal Nehru on 16 December 1951.
Old timers believe that the present collection constitutes only half of the original art wealth collected by the Nawab. His employees siphoned off part of it, since the Nawab depended upon his staff to keep a vigil.
In 1968, the museum shifted to its present location at Dar-ul-Shifa, and is administered by a Board of Trustees with the Governor of Telangana as ex officio chairperson under the Salar Jung Museum Act of 1961. Some more art pieces were lost or stolen during the shifting of the museum from Diwan Devdi to the present site.