A vivid mural runs across an entire wall. Sculptures spill into courtyards. Installations invite visitors to pause, interact and look again. At the Museum of Goa, art feels playful yet political; at Karnataka’s Hampi Art Labs, monumental works, experimental installations and artists’ studios reveal the making of contemporary art. In Jaipur, the expanded Amrapali Museum moves beyond jewellery to perfume flasks, hookahs, pichkaris, and ceremonial objects. High in Leh, The Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation transforms historic homes into living cultural spaces where endangered textiles, oral histories, and contemporary practice meet. Together, these spaces are redefining the Indian museum. Across the country, private museums are replacing static displays with immersive storytelling, workshops, performances, archives and conversations. “These spaces are extremely important for India to have a vibrant cultural scene,” says Preema John, director of the Indian Music Experience Museum (IME), Bengaluru. “Breaking away from colonial perspectives, these museums are helping us tell our own stories.”
The change reflects a new audience that wants culture to be experienced, not simply observed. Museums are becoming places to linger, learn, and participate, with artist residencies, craft demonstrations, digital installations, and children’s programmes making heritage less intimidating and more accessible. They are also filling gaps left by traditional institutions, bringing greater attention to regional craft, indigenous knowledge, design, oral histories, and everyday objects.
Behind the boom is a generation of collectors such as Kiran Nadar, Anupam Poddar, Rajashree Pathy, and the Lalbhai family, who have spent decades building collections of art, textiles, jewellery, manuscripts and ethnographic objects. The result is more than a new museum model. It is a new way of encountering heritage—where objects are not merely preserved but interpreted, questioned, and kept alive.
The Amrapali Museum in Jaipur, for instance, uses an extraordinary collection of jewellery and adornment to explore rituals, communities, craftsmanship and identity, while Hampi Art Labs places contemporary art, artist studios, and residencies within the cultural landscape of Hampi. The shift also reflects changing audiences: younger visitors increasingly seek cultural experiences that are immersive, social, and visually engaging, but also meaningful and rooted in place. “The role of museums has changed dramatically,” says John. “People no longer come only to look at objects behind glass. They come to participate, to learn, to question and to connect.” India’s first interactive music museum, the IME brings the country’s diverse musical traditions to life through rare instruments, memorabilia, photographs, recordings, and interactive exhibits, spanning classical, folk, Bollywood, pop, and contemporary music. Spread across nine galleries and an outdoor sound garden, IME moves beyond classical music to explore community traditions, women pioneers, protest songs, regional music, and the science of sound. IME rejects the static museum model to become a space where Indian music is heard, felt and co-created. A 2008 visit to Seattle’s Experience Music Project left real estate entrepreneur and IME founder MR Jaishankar struck by the absence of a museum dedicated to India’s vast musical heritage. “I found it quite shocking and decided to create not just a museum for Indian music, but one that is truly interactive,” he recalls. Rajiv Arora, whose Amrapali Museum in Jaipur recently opened a second wing, has spent nearly five decades collecting objects that illuminate India’s material culture beyond jewellery. “Every object tells a story,” he has often said. He created the museum to ensure these stories remain accessible rather than locked away in private homes.
The same impulse drives the Shekha Museum in Nawalgarh, Shekhawati, Rajasthan, which opened about two years ago in a restored 19th-century haveli now part of the Vivaana hotel. The museum houses around 150 objects, sourced largely from other havelis, in the region, along with contemporary pieces, from the collection of hotelier and culture enthusiast Atul Khanna. “While most people focus on the frescoes of Shekhawati, I was intrigued by objects that tell us about the trade practices of the time, the rich merchants’ lifestyle, their hobbies, families and more,” says Khanna. His collection includes silver walking sticks, handwritten trade and property documents, elaborate doors and windows, crystal perfume bottles and ingenious safes that, with their multiple moving parts, are almost impossible to open without their lost keys. For Khanna, preserving these objects is also a way of preserving a vanishing landscape. “It is regretful to see the havelis being torn down to make modern buildings.”
Like Khanna, Ladakhi designers Jigmat Norbu and Jigmat Wangmo offer a compelling example of what cultural confidence can mean in practice. Both trained at NIFT Mohali before working in mainstream fashion. But when the couple returned to Ladakh in 2008, they began looking more closely at the textile traditions of their own region. They discovered a rich but largely overlooked heritage of indigenous wool, weaving techniques, and traditional garments. “We realised that there was so much richness in our own textiles and traditions, but very little was being done with them,” says Norbu. After two years of research, they launched Jigmat Couture in 2010, reinterpreting Ladakhi textiles and craft traditions for contemporary audiences while documenting and preserving a cultural vocabulary at risk of being forgotten.
Ladakh proves that some of the most interesting museum stories in India today are unfolding far from established institutions. In Odisha, a quiet house may hold thousands of palm-leaf manuscripts; in Kolkata, an artist’s studio may open its doors to visitors; in Mysuru, a roomful of sculptures may reveal the lifelong preoccupations of a single maker; and in Chennai, a collection of mechanical clocks can transport visitors to an age of brass gears, chiming faces, and intricate craftsmanship. Across the country, private museums are emerging in unexpected places, often driven by one person’s curiosity, obsession or determination to save something before it disappears. At the Amrapali Museum in Jaipur, the objects Arora rescued grew into a collection of more than 4,700 artefacts, parts of which have travelled to jewellery exhibitions across India and the UK. Scholars, historians and design students now use the collection for research. “If I keep my collection in a locker, it would be like hoarding them,” says Arora. “It makes sense and becomes useful only if others can see them.”
The phenomenon is particularly striking in regions with rich but under-documented material cultures. At Udayapur in Odisha, Dasarathi Pattanaik’s museum and library—built over decades by the man affectionately known as Dasia Aja—houses books, manuscripts, archaeological objects, art and artefacts, including more than 5,000 rare palm-leaf manuscripts. Elsewhere in the state, collectors have created museums devoted to newspapers, stamps, coins, radios and other forms of everyday ephemera. Walking through them can feel like rummaging through an enormous family attic, where a manuscript, ceremonial object or forgotten tool suddenly opens a window into another time.
Bengal has a similar culture of personal collecting, now finding new public expression. The conversion of artist Jamini Roy’s former home in Kolkata into a museum is particularly evocative: visitors encounter not just his paintings but the physical world in which he lived and worked. At Chennai’s Robert Kennedy Clock Museum, for instance, visitors encounter mechanical timepieces more than a century old, with the collector himself explaining their workings and histories. The appeal lies as much in the storytelling as in the objects. At the Museum of Goa, artist Subodh Kerkar takes a different approach, using contemporary art to explore the state’s landscapes, communities, and histories. Described as a “laboratory of ideas”, the museum demonstrates how private institutions can reinterpret history rather than simply preserve it.
Such museums have also stepped into gaps left by India’s public museum infrastructure. While government institutions safeguard invaluable collections, constraints of funding, staffing, and space can limit their ability to experiment and reach newer audiences. Private museums, by contrast, can be more agile—collecting unusual objects, creating unexpected juxtapositions, and building narratives around them. Private museums have been energising the western art scene since 1920s, says Nishant, assistant professor with the department of history of art at the Banaras Hindu University. “They are doing the same for Indian art, promoting the museum-going culture in our country,” he adds.
For Vidya Shivdas, curator at the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, what’s interesting is that contemporary art has finally found a place in the larger art narrative. “These private spaces have also given platforms to diverse, forgotten narratives including national tragedies, tribal and folk arts,” she adds. This impulse to take private collections beyond the vault inspired former banker and Sarmaya founder Paul Abraham to establish Sarmaya in 2015 as a “museum without boundaries”. It began as a digital platform before opening a permanent space in Mumbai’s Fort district. Today, its collection of more than 10,000 objects—from coins, maps and manuscripts to folk art and contemporary works—offers an intimate journey through India’s cultural history.
“The fundamental purpose of Sarmaya is to get a wider audience to learn about India’s art, culture and heritage and build curiosity about it,” says Abraham. Pavitra Rajaram, brand custodian at Sarmaya and an AD100 designer, says the shift is already visible: “We are very happy to see the collection out of the vaults and reach outside visitors.”
For Kiran Nadar, founder of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), private museums can fill gaps left by limited public funding. “In a country where state funding for the arts is minimal and often politicised, private initiatives have created spaces for artistic experimentation, scholarship, and public engagement that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise,” she says. Founded in 2010 as India’s first major private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art, KNMA now spans 50,000 sqft across Saket and Noida. By the end of this year, its one-million-square-foot campus near Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport is expected to open, making it one of South Asia’s largest museum projects. The museum grew from a practical problem: many important works in Nadar’s collection, built since the 1990s, had nowhere to be seen. “Art should not remain unseen; it needs to be experienced, studied and debated,” says Nadar.
A similar impulse led Anupam Poddar to establish Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) in Bengaluru. “In this day and age, to not have a space for our people to see our art and experience the sheer diversity of our culture is not fair to them, our culture, and history,” says Poddar. He and his wife, Radhika Poddar, donated half their collection and placed the rest on a 20-year loan. The movement is also reaching beyond the metros. In Guwahati, Sangita Jindal, chairperson of the JSW Foundation, is spearheading the 45,000 sqft Assam Heritage Museum, bringing Assamese textiles, crafts, and living traditions into dialogue with global cultures. “Our intention is to open a space of dialogue, where local heritage is placed in conversation with global cultures,” says Jindal.
These projects, however, are only the beginning. “It’s wonderful to see how individuals who have passionately collected art over years are sharing them with people, also creating cultural hubs in their respective cities,” says Nilanjana Som, a curator with Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya and a museologist. For every celebrated masterpiece in a metropolitan gallery, countless stories are still waiting to be collected, conserved, and told. Institutions such as IME, MAP, KNMA, the Textile Museum of Ladakh and Amrapali have strengthened scholarship and research around India’s cultural heritage. But alongside these larger institutions are smaller, local museums that preserve deeply rooted community histories—and often struggle simply to survive.
In Kakching, Manipur, schoolteacher Mayanglambam Merina is fighting to keep her late father, Manipuri author and translator Mayanglambam Gourachandra’s collection alive. The People’s Museum occupies three rooms and a library filled with Manipuri textiles, shell, stone, and ivory jewellery, Neolithic tools, and books and manuscripts in Meitei. “My father passed away in 2023, before he could complete cataloguing the objects,” says Merina. “Unfortunately, I know little about museum management and don’t have the funds to pay scholars to complete his work.”
Gourachandra began collecting in 1983, receiving objects as gifts from communities across Manipur while conducting research. His collection has supported scholars from across India and abroad in their PhD research, but political instability and sporadic violence in Manipur have sharply reduced visitors and researchers. Merina fears for the museum’s future. “I hope it doesn’t perish from lack of funds,” she says.
The Thakar Adivasi Kala Aangan Museum and Art Gallery in Pinguli, Sindhudurg, faces a similar struggle. Padma Shri artist Parshuram Gangavane, an expert in the 350-year-old Chitrakathi tradition, converted a cowshed into a museum in 2006 to display his family’s paintings and wooden puppets. His ancestors travelled from village to village, using these to narrate mythological stories. “Students from many art and design schools come to us to view and learn the art,” says Chetan, Parshuram’s son. “But with the limited income of an artist’s family, we just about manage with what we have.” Parshuram hopes to expand the museum and make it more interactive and educational. Though the state government gave a `20 lakh grant, which was used to build a new wing, the structure remains unfinished. Work stopped five years ago and, despite repeated appeals to the government, has yet to resume. Luckily, the FD Alpaiwalla or the Mumbai’s Parsi Museum’s renovation was completed. It received some funds from the ministry of culture for the same, also aided by the Parsi Panchayat. It reopened last year after being closed down in 2018. In its new avatar, it displays the heritage of the Parsis of India and Zoroastrians of Iran. “It is a repository of the Parsi culture and heritage, and is one-of-a-kind in the world,” says co-curator Pheroza Godrej.
But these museums, too, are largely city-based. The more immediate challenge is to secure the survival of the many small private museums scattered across India, which preserve local, often unheard-of histories. Equally contentious is establishing the provenance of objects in private collections. “The provenance and sourcing are major concerns of the modern museums today,” says Monisha Ahmed, an anthropologist and cultural researcher who is widely regarded for her work on Ladakh’s textiles. Traditionally, collecting often ended in donation. Lawyer and art historian Karl J Khandalavala, for instance, donated some 800 works from his remarkable collection of Indian art to Mumbai’s CSMVS. In Bengaluru, industrialist and collector SK Patil gave hundreds of paintings, drawings and sculptures to the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath. For such patrons, collecting was less about possession than preservation. Today, however, “there is hardly any space in existing government-and-state-run museums. Nor do they have the manpower to take care of them,” says Ahmed.
Yet these marquee collections represent only a fraction of India’s cultural landscape. Thousands of regional craft traditions, musical instruments, textiles, photographs, ritual objects, and everyday artefacts remain undocumented, scattered across family collections or at risk of disappearing with each generation. The past is present—but not in as many places as it should be. Their custodians are part of an avant-garde effort to ensure that India is remembered not only for what it is, but for what it was.