Gandhi Memorial Museum

Housed in the tamukkam (old exhibition pavilion) of the Rani Mangammal is the excellent Gandhi Memorial Museum, set in spacious and relaxing grounds. The maze of rooms contains an impressively moving and detailed account of India’s struggle for independence from 1757 to 1947, and the English-language signs pull no punches about British rule. Included in the exhibition is the blood-stained dhoti (long loincloth) that Gandhi was wearing at the time he was assassinated in Delhi in 1948; it’s here because he first took up wearing the dhoti as a sign of native pride in Madurai in 1921.