Masonry infill walls increase the initial stiffness of reinforced concrete (RC) frames and attract more seismic shear forces on buildings thereby reducing the demand on the RC frame members. Sometimes window or ventilator openings have been left in the infill wall for architectural necessities. The purpose of this study is to experimentally investigate the behaviour of RC non-ductile frame with partial masonry infills under lateral loads. A two-bay two-storeyed one-third scale model is built with partial brick masonry infill and tested under reversed cyclic lateral load. Test results showed that the failure of the RC frame is highly influenced by the damage of column portion adjacent to the partial infill. The partially filled masonry wall induced captive-column effect and leads to a brittle shear failure of the column in the regions without infill. The stiffness of the infilled frame decreased very rapidly after the initiation of cracks in the captive columns and is followed by the diagonal failure of the partial masonry infill. Results demonstrated the failure with respect to ductility, strength and hysteretic characteristics.