There are museums built to impress, and then there are museums built to remember. The newly opened Sanskriti Museum of Indian Textiles and Everyday Art, housed within the Humayun’s Tomb World Heritage Site in Sunder Nursery, New Delhi, belongs firmly to the second category. It does not chase grandeur. It chases honesty. And in doing so, it has created one of the most quietly moving cultural spaces to open in Delhi in recent memory.
The story of this museum begins long before its doors opened this August. It begins with O.P. Jain, a paper manufacturer who, in the decades following India’s independence, set out on a personal mission that would define the rest of his life. He travelled across the country, not in search of rare treasures or celebrated artworks, but in search of the ordinary. Locks. Combs. Toys. Kitchen tools. Writing instruments. The kinds of objects most people use without a second thought, and discard without a second glance.
Jain believed these objects carried something worth preserving, a quiet record of how people actually lived, worked, played, and prayed. Over three decades, his collection grew to include more than 2,000 artefacts and 500 textiles, gathered from sources as varied as temple donors and roadside junk dealers. Much of it remains uncatalogued to this day, its exact origins lost to time. Yet that uncertainty is part of what makes the collection so compelling. These are not objects chosen for their provenance. They were chosen because someone, somewhere, once needed them.
In 2023, the Sanskriti Board of Trustees made the decision to gift this remarkable collection to the nation through the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, already renowned for its restoration work across the Humayun’s Tomb complex, partnered with IGNCA to bring the collection to public life. The result is a museum built not for a single moment, but for a sustained future, with an initial five-year term of display and an ongoing commitment to conservation, research, and public programming.
This kind of collaboration between private philanthropy and national institutions is rare, and it offers a model worth celebrating. A lifetime’s worth of careful collecting has found a permanent, protected home, ensuring that Jain’s decades of work will continue to educate and inspire long after his own journey has ended.
What sets this museum apart is not only what it holds, but how it presents it. Rather than organising objects by region, material, or century, as most museums do, the curators chose a different structure entirely. The gallery is arranged to mirror the human life cycle, moving from birth through childhood, education, adulthood, leisure, and finally, into old age and ritual.
Visitors begin among children’s toys and a hand carved wooden walker, designed to steady a toddler’s first steps. From there, the journey moves through inkwells and writing slates that once filled a student’s satchel, farming tools and trade implements that speak to the demands of adult life, and objects of leisure such as ornately crafted hookahs from the Deccan and a coconut shell pipe from Gujarat.
Perhaps the most extraordinary piece in the entire collection is a painted wooden tiger from Rajasthan, built as a portable vanity case for a noblewoman. Inside its hundred compartments are combs, mirrors, hair implements, and even tiny boardgames, everything she might need during a hunting expedition. It is a striking reminder that even the most functional objects were once made with extraordinary care and imagination.
Along the walls, textiles from across India bring colour and texture to the experience. Kantha and jamdani from Bengal, ikats from Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, phulkari from Punjab, and bandhani from Rajasthan all hang together, spanning the mid nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries. Among them is a double ikat silk saree from Patan, woven with such precision that its elephant motifs still appear to walk across the fabric, more than a century after it was In a city filled with grand monuments and celebrated masterpieces, the Sanskriti Museum offers something different, and something arguably more valuable. It offers proof that history is not only made by kings and artists, but by the ordinary people who used these objects every single day.
This museum only fulfils its purpose through visitors who choose to walk through it, ask questions about the pieces whose origins remain unknown, and carry these stories forward. Many of the textiles are still under active restoration, and the museum’s programme of lectures and seminars continues to grow, meaning every visit adds something to an evolving body of knowledge.
O.P. Jain spent a lifetime believing that heritage is meant to be cared for, studied, and shared, not simply admired from a distance. Now that his collection belongs to all of us, the least we can do is show up, look closely, and let it educate, inspire, and provoke the curiosity it was always meant to spark.
Plan your visit to the Sanskriti Museum of Indian Textiles and Everyday Art at Humayun’s Tomb World Heritage Site, Sunder Nursery, New Delhi.
