Rupayan Sansthan

Rupayan Sansthan was established in 1960 by founder-director the late Padma Bhushan Komal Kothari (renowned ethnomusicologist and folklorist) and his friend Padma Shree Vijaydan Detha (folk storyteller and a writer) with the simple idea of collecting folk tales and folk songs to bring out the richness of the Rajasthani language, which is the mother tongue of more than 40 million people of Rajasthan. Since its inception, Rupayan Sansthan has expanded its scope from merely research and archiving, to educating Rajasthanis on traditional livelihoods and cultures and working with traditional performing arts communities on development issues. It was found that the problem of language covered the whole ways of life of people and their goal became larger than collecting tales and songs. The institute further expanded its archival and research work in many fields like folk musical instruments, forms of folk ballads, folk epics of long lays, folk gods and goddesses, rural food, nomads and pastoral ways of life, ethnography and finally got involved in evaluating the traditional ways in which one generation passes its knowledge and skills to the next generation.