Thursday, October 19

After a breakfast which features masala dosa and sambar among other things, we head for the official Gandhi Memorial Museum, whose website, I will discover later, has not been updated to https and will therefore soon disappear from a growing number of browsers.

The museum has relatively little to say about Gandhi and a lot to say about the 200 year struggle for independence.

The museum lives inside the “historic Tamukkam Palace belonging to Rani Mangammal of Nayak Dynasty built about 1670 A.D. Later, this was under the occupation of the Nawab of Carnatic, the East India Company and a few others. Finally the Palace had remained for many years as the official residence of the British District Collector of Madurai, It was in 1955 the palace with about 13 acres of land was gifted by the Tamil Nadu State Government to the All India Gandhi Smarak Nidhi for the purpose of housing Gandhi Memorial Museum”.

Outside you can photograph Gandhi pacifying a dinosaur, so I do.