The National Crafts Museum in Delhi was not meant to behave like a museum. Its architect Charles Correa had conceptualised the plan as a stroll along an Indian street — turning the idea of prescribed hierarchies of museums on its head with his leitmotif of open-to-sky spaces and single-storey structures. In 1975, when his client Pupul Jayakar called in his expertise to create a space to house India’s exemplary folk art and handicraft, Correa was very conscious of what the scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy had warned — the distortion of objects out of context. Moving away from arranging the collection into a chronology or geography, Jayakar had suggested three zones: village crafts, temple crafts and court or palace crafts. Just as the central spine coaxes one to move from one zone to the other, you’d notice the changing scenario, from the leafy champas to the tulsi patch to the exquisite haveli, and each time the scale expands, the exhibits grow larger and the flooring changes from brick to finally, marble. Correa had planned for the architecture of the museum and the layout of exhibits to share a certain synergy. While planning the temple galleries, Correa had wanted a larger-than-life object to command the low-lying structures and the courtyard, such that it stencilled the sky. Jyotindra Jain, the then director of the Crafts Museum, had his eyes peeled during his trips across the country, and, on a Gujarat trip in the mid-80s, he saw a towering temple chariot — he knew immediately that he had found the central exhibit. Around the same time, Correa was also designing Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal and Jawahar Kendra in Jaipur; they also echo ideas from the Crafts Museum. In its 5,500 sq m area, there are also replicas of village homes and shrines from different parts of India. Designed by architect Ram Sharma and sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri for the Asia Trade Fair in 1972, this village complex has over 15 structures, from a Rajwar hut and a Gond courtyard to a Toda dwelling. Bookended by Purana Quila and Pragati Maidan, the museum would become a reference library of sorts for craftspeople who were increasingly losing touch with tradition. It would become a space where artisans from different states could learn from each other and exhibit their skills to urban patrons. “The large permanent collection of 25,000 items of folk and tribal arts and crafts, and textiles is housed in a concrete but almost ‘invisible’ building. Charles Correa had a challenge before him — on the one hand to provide a pucca building for safe preservation and display of rare art objects, but on the other hand, not to let the building be so imposing that it would belittle humbler objects collected from village homes. Also, the scale and appearance of the building had to be such that it would not attempt to upstage its ancient neighbour, the Purana Quila,” says Jain.
