Punjab's public collections are the Government Museum and Art Gallery at Chandigarh, holding the Indian share of the Lahore Museum division; the Central Sikh Museum at the Golden Temple; the Partition Museum at Amritsar; the Sanghol museum; the Maharaja Ranjit Singh Museum at Amritsar; the Qila Mubarak collections at Patiala; and the Virasat-e-Khalsa at Anandpur Sahib.
Virasat-e-Khalsa, opened in 2011, designed by Moshe Safdie, is the most visited of them by a wide margin and is an interpretive museum rather than a collection: it holds very few original objects and tells the story with installations.
The Partition Museum at Amritsar, opened 2017, is built on donated objects and recorded testimony.
There is no Punjab state archaeological museum of any scale, no comprehensive collection of Punjabi material culture, no textile museum, and no institution collecting the ordinary objects of village life before they disappear.
A state with about twelve and a half thousand villages, a five-hundred-year religious tradition and a four-thousand-year archaeological record has fewer museum objects on display than a mid-sized European city.
The Lahore Museum's collection was divided in 1948 on a formula of roughly sixty to forty, and the Indian share went to a museum that did not exist yet. It sat in store at Amritsar and Patiala until the Chandigarh building opened in 1968. The Gandhara pieces on the two sides of that division are two halves of one collection.
Sanghol, dug from 1968, produced a Kushan stupa and a buried hoard of 117 carved sandstone railing pieces of the Mathura school: sixty-nine pillars, thirty-five crossbars and thirteen coping stones. It is one of the largest finds of its kind anywhere in India. The hoard is kept in the site museum at Sanghol, in a village in Fatehgarh Sahib district that hardly anybody goes to, and other Sanghol sculpture is shown at Chandigarh.
None of them has a published catalogue of its holdings. A researcher cannot find out what is in a Punjab museum without going to it and asking.