Lovely Experience Walking Around Museum- Pondicherry Museum

Puducherry museum

The paintings are mostly oil on canvas, oil on board, oil on paper and water colors. Some of the most popular ones include Siva in cosmic dance- oil on canvas, Danae by Antonio da Correggio, Gentlini in water color, la Madeleine- oil on canvas, portraits of Gandhi and Nehru etc.

1) The Geology Room:
It contains various limestone forms such as pink shell, gritty shell, impure crystalline forms etc.; beach sands such as garnet, ilmenite, monazite, rutile and zircon; shells such as auger, frog, whelks, olives, hairy tritons, spindle, margin, moon, dog whelks, horn shells, conidia, skew shells, conus textilis etc. which indicate Puducherry's unique coral reefs and ecosystem which provide such a varied range of minerals and marine extracts.

Apart from these, this section also includes rare stones such as fossiliferous sandstone, amethyst and moonstone. The natives learnt to make handicrafts with these minerals and came up with variety of conch ear ornaments, hand bangles, terracotta ear ornaments, pendants, rings etc. So much so that there was a school of studying the process of bead and glass making at Arikamedu.Stone bead making at Arikamedu at that time was at the apex in manufacturing beads in the South-East Asia.

2) The Numismatic Section:
This section includes coins and currencies from not only the proto-historic era or the ones from the various South-Indian empires but also from the various points of time when India was under colonial rule such as that from the Dutch India, French India, British India etc. It has a collection of currencies from all over the world, primarily from the regions it had trade relationships with such as Rome, Russia, Greece, Portugal among others.

3) The Transport Gallery:
The gallery consists of a range of transportation modes used by the royals and the French later. Some of the vehicles at display include a 424cm long palanquin, a 205cm long push-push vandi also called as the pousse-pousse gifted by the family of Thiru in the 19th century, a bullock cart, a 19th century man-drawn coach, a four,-wheeledhorse-drawn two seated coach made of iron and wood donated by Cojande Darianath in the 19th century.

4) Fossils:
This section is one of the most significant ones in the museum as it provides fossils all the way back from more than 200myb such as wood fossils, gastropods, lamellibranches, ammonite and alectryonia from nearby places like Trichy and Ariyaloor. The section boasts of petrified wood which is a tree now completely turned into stone due to permineralization of organic materials which are replaced by minerals. The tree however retains its form and thus looks like a 3D representation of the original tree.

The fossil woods are around 20 million years old presently and are same in all respects to the original tree, down to microscopic level, rings, tissues and the impressions of the bark. Most of these woods and fossils have survived all the way down from more than 250-300 million years before .