30 
THE INDIAN MUSEUM: 1814—1914. 
Immediately after its foundation, the new Museum 
received three different collections from the Archaeological 
Survey of India, through its Director-General, Sir Alexander 
Cunningham. These were :— 
(1) The remains of an ancient stupa and the railing 
around it from Bharhut, Nagod State, Central India. 
(2) A number of bas-reliefs of the Indo-Greek School of 
sculpture. 
(3) A collection of images and other antiquities found 
during the excavation of the temple courtyard of Bodh-Gaya. 
At the same time the Museum received a collection of 
plaster casts of the bas-reliefs in the cave-temples of Uda- 
yagiri and Khandagiri in Orissa. 
These additions to the collection of the Asiatic Society 
of Bengal made the new Museum the premier museum of 
Indian archaeology. Even now the remains of the Bharhut 
stupa, the collection of Gandhara sculptures, and the mediae¬ 
val sculptures from Magadha are the most important col¬ 
lections in the Archaeological Section. 
At the beginning, all departments of the Museum were 
placed under Dr. J. Anderson, the First Superintendent. 
The archaeological exhibits were arranged bj^ him in the 
rooms set apart for archaeology on the ground-floor of the 
building. His arrangement was completed, and the archaeo¬ 
logical galleries thrown open to the public, in 1878. 
Dr. Anderson must have devoted a good deal of his time 
to archaeology. He had arranged the entire collection from 
Bharhut in one room, where he attempted to set up the 
different parts of the railing, and one of the gateways 
of the stupa, in their original positions.^ In this work he 
was constantly helped by Sir Alexander Cunningham, then 
Director-General of Archaeology in India, and the late 
Raja Rajendra Lala Mittra. The reconstruction of the rail¬ 
ing and gateway of the stupa involved the restoration in 
1 It was apparently intended at first to erect the railing outside in the 
quadrangle of the Museum, round a large pipal-tvee that formerly grew there. 
The seal of the Trustees, the design of which is reproduced on the title-page 
of this book, is believed to perpetuate the intention in effigy. 
