Pune Exhibition Reclaims Pastoralist Cultural Heritage at Zapurzha Museum

The exhibition now open at Zapurzha Museum of Art and Culture in Pune marks a deliberate intervention in a conversation that cultural institutions have largely avoided. Across the country, the collections of major museums tend to privilege courtly traditions, religious iconography, and the outputs of formally trained artists — frameworks that historically excluded the mobile, oral, and ecological knowledge systems of India's pastoralist communities. The Zapurzha show is part of a quiet but significant recalibration in how cultural spaces are thinking about the boundaries of heritage.

India's pastoralist traditions span centuries. Communities such as the Gujjars, Bakarwals, and Rabaris maintained seasonal migration routes across the Deccan plateau that sustained regional trade networks and agricultural cycles. Their knowledge of grazing patterns, breed management, and ecological balance was refined over generations. Yet colonial land administration reframed these migrations as disorder, and post-independence development policy treated settled agriculture as the index of economic progress. Restrictive grazing laws and government settlement programmes progressively eroded the mobility that pastoralist livelihoods depended on. The communities did not disappear — their histories were simply not collected, catalogued, or displayed.

The exhibition addresses this directly. Rather than positioning pastoralist culture as a subject for anthropological study, Zapurzha's curation treats it as a living tradition with its own intellectual and aesthetic coherence. Works on display draw from oral histories, material culture, and ecological practices alongside contemporary artistic responses to the displacement of these communities from public cultural memory. The framing matters: in most institutional accounts of Indian art and heritage, pastoralist contributions to the subcontinent's economic and ecological systems have been treated as peripheral, if they appear at all.

There are legitimate questions about whether art institutions — long shaped by gatekeeping structures that reflect elite taste and urban priorities — are well-placed to carry this kind of representational work. Critics within the broader discourse on cultural institutions have noted that exhibitions risks tokenising communities rather than returning agency to them. The Zapurzha show appears to navigate this with care: the material is centered on community-sourced narratives and documentation, and the curatorial language avoids the reductive framing that typically reduces pastoralist life to romanticised imagery of wandering tribes.

What the exhibition ultimately reflects is a recalibration within cultural infrastructure across the Global South — a growing recognition that whose stories get institutional permanence is a political question as much as an aesthetic one. The stakes for this kind of work extend beyond any single museum programme. If cultural institutions in India begin integrating pastoralist and other non-elite traditions more seriously, it would represent a genuine shift in how heritage is defined and who gets included in the national story. The Zapurzha show is a modest beginning. Whether it signals the start of a broader institutional turn — or remains a solitary intervention — will depend on whether other cultural spaces follow.

This publication framed the exhibition as a question of cultural infrastructure and historical erasure, rather than covering it as a regional arts event.