Having served for two decades as the headquarters of Rajeev Sethi’s Asia Heritage Foundation, also the site of his recent exhibition, this tumbledown warren of rooms upon rooms, of rooms above rooms, filled with examples of Indian craft, of its ingenuity and improvisatory genius, is now being given up to the bulldozers. Everything here must be in a box by the end of the month. The building, in Delhi’s South Extension, has been open for what Sethi calls a “public stocktaking”, an opportunity for people to examine for themselves contemporary objects—from jackets and saris to sofas, lampshades, toys, and jewellery—made using a deep repository of traditional skills and knowledge. These artisans are, Sethi points out, “content creators” and “in a knowledge economy, it’s their skills we need to harness, skills…
