Every winter, Indian travellers fly into Paris and New York with the same itinerary: the glass pyramid on the first morning, the Met's steps by the second afternoon, a photograph of the Mona Lisa taken over forty shoulders. We have treated that route as the definition of cultivation. On the 2026 list of the world's 100 best museums, the ninth place belongs to Bihar Museum in Patna. The Met sits at tenth and the Louvre at 31st. Bihar Museum is the highest-ranked of the ten Asian museums on the list and the only Indian institution among the hundred.
The Bihar Museum in Patna, designed by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, brings together contemporary architecture and the cultural legacy of one of India's oldest regions.
The list comes from Worth a Journey, an independent travel guide based in Munich. It runs visitor reviews through language models, applies confidence intervals, and sends people to visit in person to verify and refine the order. That makes the ranking a verdict on the experience of walking through the doors, and the verdict says a state-run museum in Bihar sends visitors home happier than the Louvre does. The Louvre's holdings remain the largest by a distance, so the question worth chasing is what Patna got right.
From the glass pyramid to its extraordinary collections, the Louvre has long defined the global museum experience.
Spare a thought for how much Indian ambition has been poured onto the Met's front steps on the first Monday of May. The Costume Institute benefit has run every year since 1948, and for most of that history India barely registered on its staircase. Then the invitations arrived, and the nation started keeping score. Natasha Poonawalla wore a custom Sabyasachi sari over a hand-forged metal bustier in 2022. Alia Bhatt's 2024 saree took the collective effort of 163 people. Shah Rukh Khan debuted in Sabyasachi in 2025, Diljit Dosanjh followed in Prabal Gurung, and this year Princess Gauravi Kumari of Jaipur arrived in a gown rebuilt from Maharani Gayatri Devi's own pink chiffon saree. Every look became a national sporting fixture, with group chats ranking the carpet seconds like medal tallies.
The Met remains one of the world's most celebrated cultural institutions, drawing visitors into centuries of art, history and human expression.
The obsession has since moved indoors. On 21 October, Sabyasachi hosted a Diwali reception inside the Met, celebrating his ongoing multi-year partnership with the institution. Guests found a peacock centrepiece, cascading pomegranates, and a 16-foot grazing table of Dom Pérignon, caviar, oysters and artisanal mithai beneath the American Wing, with Rani Mukerji in a metallic grey saree and Masaba Gupta in a corseted take on the laal paar saree. India has spent a decade angling for a seat at the Met's table, and a week ago it finally hosted the dinner.
Here is the plot twist the party planners missed. While the country studied the Met's guest list, Patna built a museum that visitors now place one rung above the host. Construction began in October 2013 on Bailey Road with an estimated budget of 498 crore rupees. Fumihiko Maki, the Pritzker-winning Japanese architect, designed it with Mumbai's Opolis Architects across more than 13 acres. The first rooms to open, in August 2015, belonged to children. A museum that hands the youngest visitors the keys on day one tends to be good at everything else.
Farah Siddiqui, the art advisor and curator | Founder of FSCA Art Advisory
Farah Siddiqui, the art advisor and curator who founded FSCA Art Advisory in 2004, reads the ranking as a gradual awakening of cultural confidence. India, she says, has spent far too long equating international recognition with validation, and she credits the Met and the Louvre with stature earned over generations through collections, scholarship and patronage. Her verdict on Patna lands squarely on the Diwali buffet: the ninth place is a reminder that "excellence need not have an address in New York, Paris or London." She then turns the question on the rest of us, asking "are we looking at our own cultural inheritance with the same curiosity and reverence with which we look at the world's great museums?" Years of advising collectors have shown her where the gap sits. In her words, "Our collectors are increasingly internationally aware, but our institutional culture still has considerable room to grow."
The Yakshi sculpture
The reason to book the flight is the Yakshi. She is a life-sized female attendant carved in Chunar sandstone, polished to an extraordinary shine, generally dated to the Mauryan period around the third century BCE. Workers found her near Patna in 1917, and Bihar still keeps her. The Met and the Louvre own some of the most argued-over provenance files on earth, with repatriation claims trailing several of their prize pieces. Bihar Museum shows a land its own inheritance, from 400,000 BC stone tools to the present day, with a Bihari Diaspora display, a visible-storage gallery of terracotta and coins, and a children's gallery along the way. Magadha speaks for itself here, and the world has noticed.
Siddiqui learned about audiences the hard way, by curating the Elephant Parade. She curated its first Indian edition in 2017, then the largest public art project in the country. The experience hardened her belief that art should never be confined to the four walls of a gallery, because public art meets people who never chose to visit an exhibition. Indian museums, in her telling, have long designed experiences for visitors who already know how to navigate a gallery, which leaves out the child meeting a sculpture for the first time and the student from a smaller town. That is why Patna's children-first opening matters to her, and her prescription fits in a sentence: "We need to cultivate curiosity long before we expect connoisseurship." Her definition of accessibility runs deeper than an affordable ticket: "It is about making people feel that they belong in these spaces." India already holds proof that the formula works. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale drew approximately 6.6 lakh attendees to its sixth edition on a budget far smaller than many international counterparts. Siddiqui wants museums to graduate "from being repositories of our past to becoming living cultural spaces."
A triumph still deserves cross-examination. Patna already had the venerable Patna Museum, founded in 1917, and moving marquee objects like the Yakshi into the new institution reopened a real debate. Bihar Museum covers ancient India up to 1764, and the older museum holds the period after. A writer in The Wire asked whether telling Bihar's story as India's story weakens the regional identity the museum exists to celebrate. The state government that funds the glamorous newcomer owes its elder sibling a plan, and the public is entitled to read it.
Then comes the arithmetic. Japan holds five of the ten Asian places on the list, and India holds one. Ask Siddiqui who owns that number and she declines to place it at the door of any single stakeholder, describing museum building as a collective undertaking that needs a longer vision than the cycles of the art market or the tenure of an administration. The agenda she sets out has three items: sustained investment in museum infrastructure and professional talent, a stronger culture of private patronage and public-private collaboration, and a fundamental shift in how institutions approach young audiences.
Private patronage carries much of her argument. Collectors who have spent decades building significant holdings, she says, could contribute immensely to the understanding of Indian modern and contemporary art, and she wants "a culture in which collecting is accompanied by a sense of stewardship." She points to the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art as a demonstration of how private initiative can strengthen the preservation, presentation and scholarship of modern and contemporary Indian art. She credits the Museum of Art & Photography in Bengaluru with adding a new dimension to the landscape by "creating a platform for visual histories, photography and multidisciplinary artistic practices." Her own profession sits in the frame too: "As advisors, we influence what gets collected, what gets valued and, to some extent, what enters the historical narrative."
Her wish is for a day when an Indian museum on an international list is "no longer an exception, but a natural reflection of the cultural richness and institutional excellence that this country has to offer." The first step costs very little. A ticket to Bihar Museum costs 100 rupees for adults and 50 for children. Book Patna, stand before the Yakshi, and let the Louvre wait until next winter.
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Read these on the house, with our compliments.
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Every winter, Indian travellers fly into Paris and New York with the same itinerary: the glass pyramid on the first morning, the Met's steps by the second afternoon, a photograph of the Mona Lisa taken over forty shoulders. We have treated that route as the definition of cultivation. On the 2026 list of the world's 100 best museums, the ninth place belongs to Bihar Museum in Patna. The Met sits at tenth and the Louvre at 31st. Bihar Museum is the highest-ranked of the ten Asian museums on the list and the only Indian institution among the hundred.
The Bihar Museum in Patna, designed by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, brings together contemporary architecture and the cultural legacy of one of India's oldest regions.
The list comes from Worth a Journey, an independent travel guide based in Munich. It runs visitor reviews through language models, applies confidence intervals, and sends people to visit in person to verify and refine the order. That makes the ranking a verdict on the experience of walking through the doors, and the verdict says a state-run museum in Bihar sends visitors home happier than the Louvre does. The Louvre's holdings remain the largest by a distance, so the question worth chasing is what Patna got right.
From the glass pyramid to its extraordinary collections, the Louvre has long defined the global museum experience.
Spare a thought for how much Indian ambition has been poured onto the Met's front steps on the first Monday of May. The Costume Institute benefit has run every year since 1948, and for most of that history India barely registered on its staircase. Then the invitations arrived, and the nation started keeping score. Natasha Poonawalla wore a custom Sabyasachi sari over a hand-forged metal bustier in 2022. Alia Bhatt's 2024 saree took the collective effort of 163 people. Shah Rukh Khan debuted in Sabyasachi in 2025, Diljit Dosanjh followed in Prabal Gurung, and this year Princess Gauravi Kumari of Jaipur arrived in a gown rebuilt from Maharani Gayatri Devi's own pink chiffon saree. Every look became a national sporting fixture, with group chats ranking the carpet seconds like medal tallies.
The Met remains one of the world's most celebrated cultural institutions, drawing visitors into centuries of art, history and human expression.
The obsession has since moved indoors. On 21 October, Sabyasachi hosted a Diwali reception inside the Met, celebrating his ongoing multi-year partnership with the institution. Guests found a peacock centrepiece, cascading pomegranates, and a 16-foot grazing table of Dom Pérignon, caviar, oysters and artisanal mithai beneath the American Wing, with Rani Mukerji in a metallic grey saree and Masaba Gupta in a corseted take on the laal paar saree. India has spent a decade angling for a seat at the Met's table, and a week ago it finally hosted the dinner.
Here is the plot twist the party planners missed. While the country studied the Met's guest list, Patna built a museum that visitors now place one rung above the host. Construction began in October 2013 on Bailey Road with an estimated budget of 498 crore rupees. Fumihiko Maki, the Pritzker-winning Japanese architect, designed it with Mumbai's Opolis Architects across more than 13 acres. The first rooms to open, in August 2015, belonged to children. A museum that hands the youngest visitors the keys on day one tends to be good at everything else.
Farah Siddiqui, the art advisor and curator | Founder of FSCA Art Advisory
Farah Siddiqui, the art advisor and curator who founded FSCA Art Advisory in 2004, reads the ranking as a gradual awakening of cultural confidence. India, she says, has spent far too long equating international recognition with validation, and she credits the Met and the Louvre with stature earned over generations through collections, scholarship and patronage. Her verdict on Patna lands squarely on the Diwali buffet: the ninth place is a reminder that "excellence need not have an address in New York, Paris or London." She then turns the question on the rest of us, asking "are we looking at our own cultural inheritance with the same curiosity and reverence with which we look at the world's great museums?" Years of advising collectors have shown her where the gap sits. In her words, "Our collectors are increasingly internationally aware, but our institutional culture still has considerable room to grow."
The Yakshi sculpture
The reason to book the flight is the Yakshi. She is a life-sized female attendant carved in Chunar sandstone, polished to an extraordinary shine, generally dated to the Mauryan period around the third century BCE. Workers found her near Patna in 1917, and Bihar still keeps her. The Met and the Louvre own some of the most argued-over provenance files on earth, with repatriation claims trailing several of their prize pieces. Bihar Museum shows a land its own inheritance, from 400,000 BC stone tools to the present day, with a Bihari Diaspora display, a visible-storage gallery of terracotta and coins, and a children's gallery along the way. Magadha speaks for itself here, and the world has noticed.
Siddiqui learned about audiences the hard way, by curating the Elephant Parade. She curated its first Indian edition in 2017, then the largest public art project in the country. The experience hardened her belief that art should never be confined to the four walls of a gallery, because public art meets people who never chose to visit an exhibition. Indian museums, in her telling, have long designed experiences for visitors who already know how to navigate a gallery, which leaves out the child meeting a sculpture for the first time and the student from a smaller town. That is why Patna's children-first opening matters to her, and her prescription fits in a sentence: "We need to cultivate curiosity long before we expect connoisseurship." Her definition of accessibility runs deeper than an affordable ticket: "It is about making people feel that they belong in these spaces." India already holds proof that the formula works. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale drew approximately 6.6 lakh attendees to its sixth edition on a budget far smaller than many international counterparts. Siddiqui wants museums to graduate "from being repositories of our past to becoming living cultural spaces."
A triumph still deserves cross-examination. Patna already had the venerable Patna Museum, founded in 1917, and moving marquee objects like the Yakshi into the new institution reopened a real debate. Bihar Museum covers ancient India up to 1764, and the older museum holds the period after. A writer in The Wire asked whether telling Bihar's story as India's story weakens the regional identity the museum exists to celebrate. The state government that funds the glamorous newcomer owes its elder sibling a plan, and the public is entitled to read it.
Then comes the arithmetic. Japan holds five of the ten Asian places on the list, and India holds one. Ask Siddiqui who owns that number and she declines to place it at the door of any single stakeholder, describing museum building as a collective undertaking that needs a longer vision than the cycles of the art market or the tenure of an administration. The agenda she sets out has three items: sustained investment in museum infrastructure and professional talent, a stronger culture of private patronage and public-private collaboration, and a fundamental shift in how institutions approach young audiences.
Private patronage carries much of her argument. Collectors who have spent decades building significant holdings, she says, could contribute immensely to the understanding of Indian modern and contemporary art, and she wants "a culture in which collecting is accompanied by a sense of stewardship." She points to the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art as a demonstration of how private initiative can strengthen the preservation, presentation and scholarship of modern and contemporary Indian art. She credits the Museum of Art & Photography in Bengaluru with adding a new dimension to the landscape by "creating a platform for visual histories, photography and multidisciplinary artistic practices." Her own profession sits in the frame too: "As advisors, we influence what gets collected, what gets valued and, to some extent, what enters the historical narrative."
Her wish is for a day when an Indian museum on an international list is "no longer an exception, but a natural reflection of the cultural richness and institutional excellence that this country has to offer." The first step costs very little. A ticket to Bihar Museum costs 100 rupees for adults and 50 for children. Book Patna, stand before the Yakshi, and let the Louvre wait until next winter.
TO BE CONTINUED, FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.
This is where the surface ends and the reporting begins.
The complete piece, the full archive, and access to The French Press Circle. Reporting answerable only to its readers.
Already a subscriber ?
Login
Read these on the house, with our compliments.
A selection from the current issue, open to all readers. Read them in full. The rest is one decision away.