National Museum, New Delhi (institutional record)

The National Museum in New Delhi is cited here from its own institutional catalog and exhibition record, a reliable basis for facts about an object's accession, display history and the museum's own attribution of period and provenance. As India's principal national museum holding artifacts spanning the Indus Valley civilization through the modern era, its curatorial expertise is considerable and its records are a standard reference point for South Asian archaeology and art history. Its institutional description of an object's cultural or religious significance reflects museum curatorial framing, useful and generally careful, but properly read alongside specialist scholarship and, where the object belongs to a living tradition, that tradition's own account, rather than treated as the only available interpretive voice.