Mission Statement
Sanskriti Museum & Art Gallery
The name of the museum “Sanskriti’ means cultural heritage. The findings of the archaeological heritage of Jharkhand have laid before us the archaeological roots of India. Jharkhand has been called by Sarat Chandra Roy ‘the Cradle of Anthropology’. The Sanskriti Museum presents the archaeological findings and anthropological research to qualify the cultural anthropology of Jharkhand as a continuum from the Palaeolithic to the Contemporary. The museum also has a wide range of prehistoric and historical archaeological finds of interest to the students of palaeo-anthropology and history.
The most important thing about the collection is that the objects have been collected in or around a living cultural landscape in the fields and forests and villages where there is still a continuing culture which reflects a preliterate state of mind and social organization of interest to the students of anthropology. The museum showcases the anthropo-archaeological heritage of the Hazaribagh plateau and river valleys including 14 rockart shelters, hitherto unreported Buddhist, Jain and Sarna sites brought to light by Bulu Imam, along with a number of palaeo-archaeological/ Chalcolithic, and Iron-age Asura sites which complement the discoveries of Sarat Chandra Roy in South Ranchi, as well as objects related to proto-historic Buddhist, Jain, and tribal Sarna worship.
The collections include examples of a tradition of wall painting (Khovar and Sohrai) connected with the Meso-Chalcolithic rockart brought on to paper by the tribal women artists which the museum has exhibited internationally in over 50 venues. It also displays a variety of unique ethnic embroidered Crib Quilts of Hazaribagh called ‘Ledra’ which show the motifs found in the annual ritual village paintings and rock-art. Also on display are the crafts of the forest villages- the survival craftworks and ritual objects of the hunter gatherers (Birhors), the crafts of the settled agricultural tribes, and ritual objects. There is also a wide collection of old Dokra (Malhar) lost-wax metal utensils and figurines, clay figures etc., as well as various village toys which represent the visual imagery connected with a prehistoric culture (for example, necrophylial objects in the Pharaohnic tombs of Egypt, i.e. Tutankhaman). To supplement its collection the museum has a wide ranging research section. The collections are the material evidence of researches presented in the Antiquarian Remains of Jharkhand by Bulu Imam published by INTACH and Aryan Books International in 2015.This contains a rich resource of original research papers, photographs, audio recordings of the old village songs and oral traditions of the tribal heritage of Jharkhand collected since 1970s.
The Sanskriti Museum contains over 2000 objects and is in a built area of over 2000 sq.feet. which has been in existence since the early 1990s and wholly maintained and supported by Bulu Imam and his family in a part of their old home. Since its establishment it has been open to free public viewing and has been a rich research resource for Indian and international students, who have made use of its vast archive of over 2000 research papers and photographs, which are connected intimately with the archaeological and cultural sites of the region. MPhils on anthropo-archaeological subjects have been done here for over two decades from major universities such as Casa Nuova, Venice, Univ. of California at Davis and Berkley, Princeton, Univ. of East Anglia, Mangalatan Univ., Aligarh, Calcutta University, and Benares Hindu University where a PhD was completed on the Khovar and Sohrai Art of Hazaribagh in 2003.
