DOMESTIC SPACES AS MUSEUMS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Traditional knowledge systems of India are profound, deep rooted and insightful.

- NEERO MISRA

They have benefited humanity everyone-without any discrimination and have the resilience to fit into every need, situations, compulsions, and obligations. These traditions have been carried through generations traveling from days to years to decades and to centuries and millennia in varied forms like oral traditions, skills, competencies, stories and legends then to the realm of refined sociocultural expressions like architecture, languages, folklores, rituals, performing arts like dance and music, mythologies, visual arts, and lifestyles. This further pans into the scientific knowledge, including medicines, astronomy, cosmology, mathematics, and philosophy. Spiritualism including yoga and pranayama are the dimensions adding to the subtle layers leading to the evolution of beliefs and practices like Jainism and Buddhism. All this wonderful kaleidoscopic system of rich traditions gives us enormous amounts of wealth both to conserve and to display.

When it comes to showcasing, the responsibility falls on the museums. This responsibility is three-fold.

First to select carefully curated representative pieces from the vast resources, second to display them with optimal utilization of available resources and matching with the taste of the audience and third to conserve them for the posterity. Curating, displaying, and conserving, are the three pillars on which the museums must thus play their role to carry forward the traditional knowledge of India. Added to this is the omnibus social responsibility of imparting education to the viewers - imparting knowledge, which is truthful, candid, and supported with the facts. One of the key symptoms of true knowledge is it is self-disseminating. This completes the cycle of mutual support and sustenance when every visitor becomes a co-sharer of this continuum.