R. K. Laxman Museum

The R. K. Laxman Museum in Balewadi, Pune, is devoted to the cartoonist R. K. Laxman, who produced more than 35,000 cartoons and illustrations over seven decades. His daughter Usha gathered the material after his death in 2015, and the state government and Pune Municipal Corporation built the museum, opened on 6 March 2022. Its award-winning building by the firm Unitecture is wrapped in concrete panels carrying replicas of his cartoons, set on fins so they read like a flipbook as people walk past.

A life-size Common Man, Laxman's most famous character, greets visitors and narrates the story of his creator. Galleries cover his childhood with his elder brother, the novelist R. K. Narayan, his caricatures of public figures, his Ganesha drawings, cartoons on children and on Mumbai's civic administration, and a room of crows, his favourite birds. Two audio-visual rooms show a documentary and a light-and-sound show on Malgudi, and his last cartoon, on the Mars Orbiter Mission, is on display.