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A minute's walk east from the north end of MG Road, opposite the KTDC Visitors Centre, you come to the entrance to Thiruvananthapuram's Public Gardens (Tues & Thurs-Sun 10am-5pm, Wed 1-5pm; cover ticket for all museums in complex Rs5, available only outside the Biotechnology Museum, to the left of the Government Museum). As well as serving as a welcome refuge from the noise of the city - its lawns usually filled with courting couples, students and picnicking families - the park holds the city's best museums. The Zoo (Tues-Sun 10am-5pm; Rs4, Rs5 extra with camera) is in a nice enough setting, just inside the gate on the left, but the depressing state of the inmates, and the propensity of some visitors to get their kicks by taunting them, make it eminently missable. To the east of the zoo, the extraordinary Government (Napier) Museum of arts and crafts was completed in 1880. An early experiment in what became known as the "Indo-Saracenic" style, the building has tiled double-storey gabled roofs, garish red-, black- and salmon-patterned brickwork, tall slender towers, and, above the main entrance, a series of pilasters forming Islamic arches. The spectacular interior is dimly lit through stained-glass windows, and the wooden ceiling features loud turquoise, pink, red and yellow stripes. The architect, Robert Fellowes Chisolm (1840-1915), set out to incorporate Keralan elements into colonial architecture; the museum was named after his employer, Lord Napier, the governor of the Madras Presidency.
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Highlights include fifteenth-century Keralan woodcarvings from Kulathupuzha and Thiruvattar, gold necklaces and belts, minutely detailed ivory work, a carved temple chariot ( rath ), wooden models of Guruvayur temple and an oval temple theatre ( kuttambalam ), plus twelfth-century Chola and fourteenth-century Vijayanagar bronzes. The attractive Shri Chitra Art Gallery,opposite, with its curved veranda and tiled roof, houses some splendid paintings from the Rajput, Moghul and Tanjore schools, as well as China, Tibet and Japan. The oil paintings by Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906), who is widely credited with having introduced oil painting to India, have been criticized for their sentimentality and Western influence, but his treatment of Hindu mythological themes is both dramatic and beautiful. Also on display are the paintings of the Russian artist-philosopher and mystic, Nicholas Roerich, who arrived in India at the turn of the twentieth century. His paintings amalgamate the deep and strong colors of his Russian background with the mythical landscape of the Himalayas where he died in 1947.
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