National Crafts Museum & Hastkala Academy, Folk art museum at Pragati Maidan, India
The National Crafts Museum & Hastkala Academy is a museum dedicated to traditional Indian handicrafts, located at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi. Its collection covers textiles, metalwork, sculptures, and tribal paintings gathered from all parts of the country.
The museum grew out of a crafts exhibition organized for the 1972 Asian Games in Delhi. Architect Charles Correa designed the complex, which gradually expanded into a major center for traditional Indian arts.
The museum includes a village complex with real structures brought from different parts of India, showing the settings where traditional crafts were made. Visitors can watch artisans at work inside these spaces, giving a sense of how these practices fit into everyday life.
The site covers a large outdoor area with village structures as well as indoor galleries, so wearing comfortable shoes makes the visit easier. The location near the city center makes it straightforward to reach by public transport.
Some of the village buildings in the complex were actually dismantled from their original locations and rebuilt on-site in Delhi, rather than being reproductions. This makes the museum one of the few places where genuine rural structures from different Indian states stand side by side.
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