Several Indian and foreign museums now provide indigenous communities with opportunities to showcase their own cultural heritage, ideally in accordance with their own value systems:
“It becomes necessary to privilege the oral over the written, and myth over history [and] the established institutions of managing memory stand to gain by the theoretical complexities posed by the Adivasi heritage to the current museum practices in India. I intend to demonstrate this view with reference to the Museum of Adivasi Voice at Tejgadh.” – Prof. Ganesh Devy (founding member of the Adivasi Academy at Tejgadh and BHASHA Research and Publication Centre Baroda, Gujarat)
“The tribal culture at its best provides a living example of the Gandhian concept of trusteeship” – Lachman Khubchandani in Indigenous Peoples: Responding to Human Ecology >>
As an example for other tribal community keen on preserving their cultural heritage the Adivasi Academy has established a museum at Tejgadh (Gujarat). This museum is maintained for and by local communities. Its name ‘vachaa’ means “voice or expression”:
Vachaa functions as a forum for expression of creativity and offers intellectual space to indigenous communities documenting and creating dynamical displays of their expressions, both artistic and cultural, in the form of objects, artefacts, performances and digitized multimedia images.
Learn more by browsing Museum collections – general and Museum collections – India >>
- Continue the guided tour – Part 5 >>
- Start the guided tour (Part 1)
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Explore India’s tribal cultural heritage with the help of another interactive map >>