Gandhi Memorial Museum

Following Mahatma Gandhi's assassination in January 1948, a nationwide appeal raised funds from citizens across India, rich and poor alike, to establish memorial museums in his honor; the Madurai museum, one of only five such Gandhi Sanghralayas recognized across the country, opened in 1959 and was formally inaugurated by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on 15 April of that year. It occupies the Tamukkam Palace, a structure originally built around 1670 CE, whose spacious historic halls now house a chronological exhibition tracing the story of India's colonial encounter and freedom struggle from the arrival of the earliest European trading settlements around 1500 CE through independence in 1947. Its most solemn artifact is a cloth said to be stained with Gandhi's blood from the day of his assassination, though some accounts describe the Madurai relic as a preserved copy, with the original held at the National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi. Madurai's connection to Gandhi runs deeper than the museum alone: it was here, in 1921, that Gandhi first adopted the simple loincloth (dhoti) that became his lifelong signature dress, after witnessing the poverty of local laborers.