Entering the newly opened Sanskriti Museum of Everyday Art & Indian Textiles inside Humayun’s Tomb complex, you are greeted by a 19th-century tiger mask and a brass breastplate from Karnataka. It is a fitting provocation — the museum insists that art is not what hangs in galleries, but what hangs in kitchens.
This is OP Jain’s life’s work — over 1,000 artefacts collected over five decades, now curated by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Deepali Dhingra’s walkthrough shows a radical curation: life-cycle approach. Childhood toys, betel nut crackers, wooden walkers, brass ink pots, Kashmiri papier-mâché pen cases, bronze rice measures, ornamental locks, chakhla-belan. A whole section on lotas — sculptural pots — and another on foot scrubbers with peacock handles, hairpins with women figurines.
What Jain rescued is what independent India discarded in its rush to be modern — bandhani from Rajasthan, kani shawls from Kashmir, phulkari from Punjab, Baluchari sarees with ‘Vande Mataram’ woven in Bengali script. The museum’s most powerful statement, as programme director Archana Saad Akhtar notes, is that these objects hold their own against industrial design. Charles and Ray Eames, invited by Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s, were fascinated by the lota — how design, form and function came together beautifully. Their report led to NID.
Today, as Archana says, “If we don’t safeguard these traditional techniques now, no one will know how to create them and they will disappear.” In a world of mass-produced steel, seeing a hand-inlaid wooden box or an Ayyanar terracotta elephant is political. It tells a young Delhi that Make in India is not new. India always made. We just stopped valuing it. Entry is Rs 50. It may be the most valuable hour you spend in Delhi.