The Hindu

Udupi, Nov 28: The "Museum of Folk Arts", set up by Hasta Shilpa Trust, will be inaugurated by second secretary of the Embassy of Finland Anna-Kaisa Heikkinen at the heritage village here on Friday.

A press release issued by the secretary of the trust here on Tuesday stated that it would be the first-ever museum to be opened at the heritage village. More such museums would take shape at the heritage village complex in future. The public would be allowed into the galleries and other buildings in the village after the completion of the project by the end of next year.

The undivided Dakshina Kannada district is rich with folk culture which included shrines of folk deities such as Garodi, Daivada Mane, Bhootalaya, Alade, Brahmasthana, and various rituals associated with the worship of these deities. It also has performing folk art forms such as Yakshagana and Gombeyata, among others. It has been a practice with the people in charge of folk-deity shrines to discard the centuries’ old wooden idols, metal icons, stone statues, and terra cotta figures, when they get damaged, spoiled, or developed cracks. The damaged portraits of wood, stone and terracotta are thrown into water streams, while metal icons are normally melted to cast new icons. In this process, the original characteristics of the deities are lost. The degeneration has set in even in the case of costumes, ornaments and headgears of Yakshagana and other performing art forms of the region.

With the advent of modern technology, age-old household articles of wood, stone, copper, brass, and bell metal have been replaced with stainless steel, glass, plastic, and other synthetic materials. This trend is prevalent not only in coastal Karnataka but also in other parts of the country. The heritage village has urged the authorities concerned and people not to discard or destroy those articles.

Realising that craft tradition, particularly folk tradition, is integral to ethnic identity and cultural continuity, the trust, which was set up four years ago, aims at putting together all its collection of folk artefacts in a museum with the support of Embassy of Finland in New Delhi.

The museum is spread over three buildings, divided into eight sections, each displaying ancient building form and character of "garodi", wooden folk deities of varying size, metal icons, bronze masks, and folk furniture and "Kinnala" works, folk theatre crafts such as Yakshagana, puppetry, "Moodalapaya", folk musical instruments and folk deities, figures and masks from Bastar region of central India.

This museum is perhaps the largest and most unique in India, in respect of volume, space, number, and variety of objects, rare character of the exhibits and imaginative display, the release said.