Sanskriti Museums

The Sanskriti Museums grew from the passion of the art collector and philanthropist O. P. Jain, who, inspired by a meeting with the writer Mulk Raj Anand in the 1970s, devoted himself to preserving India's everyday craft and material culture. In 1984 he set up a small museum of his collection in his Chandni Chowk home, and the Museum of Indian Terracotta and Textiles took shape in the same period. In 1990 the collection moved to Anandagram, an artist-village campus he established on the southern edge of Delhi under the Sanskriti Foundation, where the Museum of Everyday Art opened. Jain, who also long served as convenor of INTACH, was honoured with the Padma Shri in 2013.

The museums occupy the Sanskriti Kendra, an eight-acre artist-village campus at Anandagram on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road, conceived as a tranquil garden setting for the arts. Three museums, the Museum of Everyday Art, the Museum of Indian Terracotta and the Museum of Indian Textiles, are set among workshops, an artists' studio, artisan residences and a conservation laboratory, so that craft is shown as a living practice within a working creative community.