Don Bosco Museum of Indigenous Cultures

The Don Bosco Museum of Indigenous Cultures is the most visible arm of the Don Bosco Centre for Indigenous Cultures (DBCIC), a venture of the Salesians of Don Bosco spearheaded by Fr. Sebastian Karotemprel from the 1990s to document and celebrate the indigenous cultures of Northeast India. Opened to the public in the mid-2000s, it grew into the largest museum in Asia dedicated to indigenous cultures, presenting the art, history, festivals, textiles and lifestyle of more than 160 tribal communities across the seven states of the Northeast, and has featured among the top museums in India and Asia.

The museum occupies a striking seven-storey building at Mawlai on the edge of Shillong, designed by the Delhi architect Vivek Verma in a distinctive hexagonal, honeycomb-like form regarded as a modern architectural landmark of the city. Its seven floors, echoing the seven northeastern states, hold more than a dozen thematically arranged galleries, life-size recreations of tribal homes and a rooftop skywalk offering a 360-degree view of Shillong and the surrounding hills.