Crafts Museum
National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum
A village rebuilt inside a city block, where the makers are often in the room.
Founded in 1956 to keep hand skills alive rather than to embalm them, the Crafts Museum is arranged as a sequence of courtyards and verandas designed by Charles Correa over the 1970s and 80s — a building that behaves like a street. Along one side is a village complex: full-size dwellings from Gujarat, Bihar, Rajasthan and the north-east, built by craftspeople from those places.
The collection runs to some thirty-three thousand objects — terracotta, textiles, metalwork, folk painting — but the museum's real argument is the demonstration area, where weavers, potters and painters work in residence. It is the rare national institution where the things on display are still being made a few metres away.
- 01The village complexFull-scale rural dwellings, rebuilt on site by the communities that build them at home.
- 02The Bhuta figuresTall carved spirit figures from coastal Karnataka, among the most arresting objects in Delhi.
- 03Craftspeople in residenceA rotating group working in the open — buy directly, and watch it being made.
Closed Mondays. Inside the Pragati Maidan complex; the entrance has moved more than once, so check before you go.