National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum

The Crafts Museum was the vision of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, the social reformer, freedom fighter and pioneer of the Indian handicrafts revival, who conceived it as a living space where craftspeople from across India could gather to preserve their traditions. It was established in 1956 by the All India Handicrafts Board, beginning at the Regal Building on Janpath, and over the following decades assembled one of the country's great craft collections. A village complex was created in 1972 for an exhibition on rural India and made permanent from 1975, and the museum settled into its present campus at Pragati Maidan between 1977 and 1980. It was later renamed the National Crafts Museum and Hastkala Academy.

The museum's celebrated campus was designed by the architect Charles Correa, developed in phases through to around 1990. Rather than a conventional gallery block, Correa conceived it as a village-like sequence of courtyards, the Village, Darbar and Temple courts, echoing the informal spaces of an Indian street and settlement, with variations in level creating social arenas rather than a rigid plan. The design embodies the museum's philosophy of showing craft as a living practice, and includes a five-acre village complex of fifteen structures, courtyards and shrines recreated from different states.