Dandi Kutir: A museum giving digitised experience of Mahatma Gandhi’s life and teachings

Vanraj Vala, the administrator of the Dandi Kutir Museum, says during the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit (VGGS) from January 8-12, the museum saw around 2,500 visitors as the entry was made free for the event’s delegates. The three-storied museum uses technology and various mediums to tell the story of the life of Gandhi.

The museum gives access to headphones which narrate the audio-visual story in English or Hindi. The journey starts on the third floor, with stories from Porbandar, where Gandhi was born. The entire floor shows Gandhi’s family tree and small snippets of his upbringing, like how he loved looking into a kaleidoscope and watching plays in Rajkot, where he went to school. The narrative mentions the play on King Harishchandra that shaped one of Gandhi’s critical fundamentals based on truth. Most of these are depicted by 3D mapping, providing an immersive experience to the viewers.

The next floor focuses on his foreign visits to London and South Africa, emphasising the event where Gandhi was thrown off the train due to the colour of his skin. With different technologies like holography, 360-degree projections and transparent LED screens, spectators feel how Gandhi’s ideals of not consuming meat, not stealing and abstaining from women and other ideals arose in him.

The first floor has a train coach where visitors board the windows that screens have replaced depict different stations from the pre-Independence era and various places like Shantiniketan where Gandhi meets with various key figures of that time like Rabindranath Tagore and spreads his message of Satyagraha and non-violence through snippets of his speeches.

Inaugurated during the 13th Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in January 2015 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, coinciding with the Vibrant Gujarat Summit that year, Dandi Kutir is connected with the Mahatma Mandir where the summit is held through a 240-metre cable-stayed bridge. Windmills erected on the structure represent the ‘charkha’ and produce around 2 kilowatts of power.

Dandi Kutir Museum curator Vijay Patel says the experience at this museum compared to that at the Gandhi museum at Alfred High School in Rajkot and Sabarmati Ashram “is that this is digitalised, starting from his childhood to his adult stage, in other museums you will see photographs of Gandhi, memoirs, showpieces and more but with Dandi Kutir, through the films and technologies, we showcase an immersive experience of his life”.

The 170-year-old Alfred High School in Rajkot, where Gandhi graduated in 1887, has also been turned into a Mahatma Gandhi museum.

According to Vala, 30 per cent of the visitors in the recent Vibrant Gujarat summit were foreigners. “Dandi Kutir acts as a must-visit for all people who visit Gandhinagar. The visitor count stays at around 4,000 visitors per week which fluctuates depending on the time of the year as National holidays like Republic Day, Independence Day and Gandhi Jayanti see a higher number of visitors to Dandi Kutir compared to usual days,” says Vala.