Abstract

DakshinaChitra, a project of the Madras Craft Foundation, brings together the heritage of five states of South India and their myriad cultures on an extraordinary campus that seeks to re-define the museum as a lived experience of performing and visual arts, crafts, architecture, cuisine and ‘learning by doing’. This article describes an intensely personal journey over five decades of DakshinaChitra’s founder, Deborah Thiagarajan. Arriving in Chennai (then Madras) as the bride of a corporate leader and as a scholar, she soon took an interest in the crafts of a nearby village. Understanding the challenge of livelihood in deprived rural communities soon led to setting up an export business as one means of supporting endangered skills and of restoring appreciation and respect for the region’s artisans. This hands-on business experience would prove useful as Deborah Thiagarajan’s scholarship indicated an institutional need that could support artisanal activity and cultural research as well as reach out to younger generations with a re-imagined ‘museum’. The idea of DakshinaChitra took seed, and with that a staggering range of management challenges that would have to be overcome. The article describes the quest for land and finance, as well as for building the management capacities of a small, dedicated team toward drafting proposals and negotiating with authorities, donors, sector stakeholders and communities. Partners and volunteers who understood her vision championed the author’s interaction with educators, architects, designers, builders and artisans. They worked with her as a team to bring to DakshinaChitra—brick by brick and element by element—heritage structures from each state of the region, recreated here as DakshinaChitra flagship experience: old buildings brought alive in a new setting, with all the elements that together constitute heritage as both memory and life, underlining the relevance of past wisdom to present needs. The article traces a 12-year journey toward realizing this vision, and the management knowledge that had to be acquired along the way—including finance, budgeting, marketing, donor relations, fund-raising, legal frameworks and HR—toward a self-sustaining cultural enterprise now challenged by the COVID pandemic. The article includes guidance to those who might undertake similar ventures. Heritage management emerges here as the capacity to draw disciplines and fellow-spirits together to protect the quality of a vision with pragmatism, practical skills, teamwork, stamina and enduring hope.


Keywords
Vernacular architecture, crafts, museum, heritage management, performance and visual arts