Voices Dr Vikram Sampath Preeti Shenoy Dr Alka Pande Ravi Shankar gaurav yadav Mata Amritanandamayi THE new sunday express MAGAZINE Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment august 30 2026 SUNDAY PAGES 12 Private Eye Connoisseurs propelled by passion are reshaping India’s art landscape—bringing forgotten histories, new artists, and unexpected collections to curious audiences By Riddhi Doshi 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. Struck with the fact that India lacked a museum devoted entirely to its rich musical legacy, MR Jaishankar established the IME in Bengaluru in 2019 Jigmat Norbu reinterprets Ladakhi textiles and craft traditions for contemporary audience, through Jigmat Couture, launched in 2010 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 contempo, rary 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 Paul Abraham and Pavitra Rajaram wanted a “museum without boundaries”. The result was Sarmaya, established in 2015 in Mumbai 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 Turn to page 2