National Museum, New Delhi

The National Museum in New Delhi owes its existence to a specific diplomatic event rather than to a slow accumulation of colonial holdings: an exhibition of Indian art assembled for the Royal Academy in London in 1947 to 1948, drawing masterpieces from collections across the subcontinent, was so well received that instead of returning to their original, scattered homes the works were used to found a new national museum in the newly independent capital, which opened in 1949. This gave India a national collection built deliberately at independence to represent the whole country, distinct from older colonial-era institutions such as the Indian Museum in Kolkata that had grown piecemeal under British administration.

The museum has since expanded its collection well beyond the founding London exhibition through acquisition, gift and continuing archaeological work by the Archaeological Survey of India, which supplies much of its ancient material, including the Kapilavastu relics. Housed in a purpose-built government building near India Gate, it functions as the country's flagship museum in a way the older, regionally rooted Indian Museum, with its distinct colonial foundation, was never quite designed to.

The Kapilavastu relics did not come from a new site but from a second, more careful excavation of the same Piprahwa stupa mound that William Peppe had partly dug in 1898. In 1971, the Archaeological Survey of India, led by K. M. Srivastava, reopened the mound and this time dug below the floor level Peppe had reached, exposing an earlier construction phase and recovering two inscribed steatite caskets that Peppe's shallower dig had missed entirely. The Archaeological Survey retained this later material for the national collection in New Delhi rather than sending it to Kolkata, keeping the two excavations' finds administratively separate even though they came from the same mound decades apart.

The identification of Piprahwa with ancient Kapilavastu, the Buddha's childhood home, rests substantially on inscriptions recovered across both digs, though the reading and dating of the crucial texts have been debated by specialists, complicated further by a documented history of forged Buddhist inscriptions from other sites in the same region during the colonial period, which has made scholars appropriately cautious about any single reading. The museum presents the identification as the leading scholarly view rather than as beyond question, consistent with the archaeological literature's own caution on the point.