By now, it's almost 2 p.m. and you'll be ready for a light lunch. The no-frills Sagar Ratna (91-11-4150-3371; entrées, $2–$4), in the Hotel Janpath, serves basic, hearty South Indian vegetarian food. Next it's off to the peeling National Museum (91-11-2301-9272; nationalmuseumindia.gov.in), where you shouldn't pay the extra $7 to use your camera—there are enough rooms where it's verboten to make the privilege pointless—but you should opt for the audio tour (your guide will wait in the lobby). There's plenty to keep history buffs (or anyone interested in a visual primer of the grand, jumbled sweep of Indian artistic and archaeological development) entertained for hours, but impatient museumgoers need focus their time on just two galleries. Gallery 4, your first stop, contains treasures from the Indus Valley civilization, the Subcontinent's oldest, which flourished between 2600 and 1900 b.c. Pause at the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo Daro (pictured bottom right), a bronze cast from a lost-wax technique and one of the country's most important pieces of prehistoric art. The dancing girl's left arm is heavy with bangles, her throat encircled by a necklace with three drooping pendants. Look, too, at Case 22, which contains various toys, chess pieces, and small figurines—a ram, a sheep's head, a series of squirrels with marvelously bristly tails; they serve as a reminder not only of the subtlety and wit of these early, unknown craftsmen but also of the culture's love of animals in all their representations.

Then, zoom forward 3,000 years, give or take, to the second floor, which houses the museum's collection of Indian miniature paintings from the ninth through the nineteenth centuries. The miniatures, which were commissioned by the Mogul emperors, depict scenes of everyday life as well as battles, court life, fables, fantasies, and religious stories. What is striking about these works is not only the intensity of their colors but also the often dizzying mélange of cultural influences in a single painting: One Nativity scene (circa 1720) shows the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus, the image sandwiched between explanatory text in graceful Arabic. Not all the scenes are happy ones, despite their consistently astonishing vibrancy of color and fineness of detail. In A Young Lady Brought to the Harem of a Mughal Noble (circa 1725), a handsome Mogul reclines on a white bed as the titular young lady, her head covered by a length of starry lace, is presented to him by two older women while a third, attending to the Mogul, watches this sad procession, her face unreadable. The paintings document, perhaps more honestly than any history book does, the great diversity of experiences and life stories now lost to time. They are also evidence of a brilliant artistic tradition: Near the exit, stop to admire the quintet of Pahari paintings from 1730—renowned for their subtlety of detail—that illustrates Krishna's courtship of his consort, Radha. Note her emerald cuffs: That foil-bright iridescence is made from the wings of scarab beetles. Gazing at these paintings, you see where India's palette comes from—those bright, sugary colors more gloriously imagined than anything found in nature.