Every Body's Museum: Access, Rest, and the Right to Leisure

In India, the question of who a museum is built for rarely gets asked out loud Instead, the answer is embedded in their architecture and modes of display: staircases without ramps, galleries without tactile interfaces, audio guides that presume hearing, wall texts that privilege English literacy, and layouts that assume a particular kind of body moving at a particular pace.

Although the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 mandates accessibility in public buildings, implementation remains uneven. For the 2.68 crore disabled people recorded in India's last recorded census in 2011—a figure widely recognised as an undercount and outdated—many cultural institutions continue to fall short of meaningful inclusion, remaining spaces that are only beginning to reckon with accessibility as a fundamental right rather than an optional accommodation.

Students learning how to write Alt Text at Alipore Museum

There have been important efforts to address exclusion: audio guides, tactile galleries, wheelchair loans, and staff sensitisation programmes. These interventions matter, and they have expanded access for many visitors. Yet the central challenge is not simply the provision of accessible features but the framework through which institutions imagine accessibility itself. Access introduced as an addition to an otherwise unchanged museum operates differently from access embedded in the earliest stages of planning—shaping decisions about format, language, pacing, participation, and whose perspectives inform the programme from the outset. The former is accommodation; the latter is design. Much of the work that remains lies in bridging the gap between the two.

Then there is the question of leisure. In a country where disabled people continue to fight for the most basic rights — to education, employment, healthcare, legal personhood — the idea of visiting a museum for pleasure can feel like a luxury that belongs to someone else. Leisure is not an equally available resource; it is shaped by inequalities of class, caste, language, and ability. For a disabled visitor, entering an unfamiliar cultural institution often involves a series of calculations: Will the building be navigable? Will the experience be physically or mentally exhausting? Will they be welcomed as participants or merely accommodated as exceptions? Such anxieties are not individual concerns but the product of histories of exclusion. They reflect the cumulative impact of environments designed without disabled people in mind. The right to leisure—the right to engage with culture for enjoyment, curiosity, and self-expression rather than solely for educational or therapeutic ends—is one that disabled communities in India have often had to demand rather than receive.

river budur performing ‘LEGS ARE OUT OF COMMISSION [Instructions on how to walk normally] with Saurav Roychowdhury at Ashutosh Birth Centenary Hall, Indian Museum

It was out of this landscape that A Weekend in Museums: Accessibility and Inclusion Edition was conceived. Now in its third year, DAG's annual programme celebrating International Museum Day has, since its first edition, used the museum visit itself as a site of inquiry — asking what it might look like to experience a collection through movement, sound, play, and film rather than through the prescribed route of the gallery walk. This year, the question became more pointed: what would it mean to build a museum programme from the ground up around the needs of disabled and queer communities — not as a theme to be explored, but as a methodology to be practised? DAG Museums, as a cultural body in process of creating a physical space of its own, approaches this not from a position of expertise but from one of inquiry — learning alongside the institutions and communities we work with. The programme drew on open access visitor behaviour research by the Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru, (or, M. A. P.) —— and was developed in sustained dialogue with Indian Sign Language (I. S. L.) interpreters and disabled practitioners throughout.

Ex-Principal of Ramkrishna Mission Blind Boys School, Biswajit Ghosh, during exploration activity – Soft Thresholds

The three-day programme travelled across Indian Museum and Alipore Museum in Kolkata between May 16 and 18, 2026, and was accompanied by Every Body's Pace — a parallel digital space designed by Sunondo Chakraborty and Nilay Gomakhale, built around the logic of ‘spoon theory’—which advocates the management of chronic illness or disability, where ‘spoons’ represent a limited daily supply of mental and physical energy. Coined by Christine Miserandino, it helps people with energy-limiting conditions visualise their capacity, rationing energy for daily tasks (bathing, working) and highlighting the cost of activities that healthy individuals often take for granted. It is accessible from bed or from a distance and meant to remain live for a year. It held a disability studies glossary, an alt text workbook, public policy documents, and crip-queer artist resources — recognising that participation does not require a body in a specific place at a specific time, and that rest is a legitimate mode of cultural engagement.

Caregiver explaining prompts for exploration activity to dependent participant

The collaborators were not brought in to illustrate the programme's themes. Their practices were the programme. Nu Misra, disabled queer feminist organiser and founder of Revival Disability India, spoke not about disability as a social problem to be managed but about ‘crip joy’ — about the ways queer and disabled communities build pleasure, solidarity, and care on their own terms, in the face of structural exclusion. Their observation that disabled people are routinely desexualised, that certain bodies are marked as outside the realm of desire and full personhood, reframed what it means for a museum to claim to welcome everyone. river budur's performance, LEGS ARE OUT OF COMMISSION [Instructions on how to walk normally], performed with Saurav Roychowdhury, took the concept of normative movement — the unspoken expectation, encoded in museum architecture and etiquette, that a body will stand upright, walk steadily, and move through a gallery in a prescribed way — and subjected it to rigorous, embodied critique. The silent disco that followed was the affirmative counterproposal: a space where dancing, sitting, making origami, and resting were all equally valid, where no single mode of presence was marked as fuller than another. Resting Museum — the artist duo of Priyanka D'Souza and Shrey Pathak, whose practice uses rest, queerness, and disability as methodology — sent tactile works that ran across all three days. Inayat Khan's Bed and A Moment of Respite—inspired by eponymous Mughal miniature paintings from the St. Petersburg Muraqqa – asked visitors to stop, touch, and be still. What emerged from this was one of the programme's clearest findings: visitors had to be actively invited to touch, not just permitted to. Once they were told directly that the works asked for their hands, something shifted. People sat, they slowed down, they read the accompanying information in a way that passive signage had never produced. Permission, it turned out, is not the same as invitation.

Young blind participants exploring Indian Museum with caregiver

The Soft Thresholds scavenger hunt, which opened the programme at the Indian Museum, made something similar happen at the scale of the whole building. Participants were given prompt cards asking them to find a display case that was too high to see from a seated position, a door that needed two people to open, a corridor that would be better as a nap zone, a corner that felt like a safe queer loving spot. The activity turned visitors into active readers of institutional space — not consumers of a collection but critics of the environment that houses it. It also surfaced something that is easy to overlook: a disabled person does not arrive at a museum alone. They arrive with caregivers, family members, mobility tools, interpreters, other disabled people. The collective that makes presence possible is rarely accounted for in how institutions plan capacity, seating, or participation.

Nu Misra, founder of Revival Disability, talking about building communities of queer and disabled joy

The audience response across three days suggested that when people are genuinely invited in—not accommodated but designed for—they show up differently. People stayed longer than expected. Participants spoke about the museum differently afterwards; not as a place they had been shown around but as a place they had read for themselves. These are small things. But they pointed toward something larger.

Later this summer, DAG was invited to conduct a session at a summer camp at the National Institute for the Locomotor Disabilities in Kolkata—a meaningful step into a community we had been trying to reach. Thirty students on the blindness spectrum, aged seven to eighteen, spent an hour with Jamini Roy's Cat with Prawn from the DAG collection, encountering a single painting through sound, touch, storytelling, and play. No gallery, no wall text, no prescribed route. It was a small beginning but one that mattered.

What the programme and the summer camp together made clear is that access is not a checklist. It is a question asked from the very beginning—about who is in the room when decisions are made, about what language is being used and why, about what a body is assumed to be capable of, about what rest means and whether it counts. It requires disabled practitioners at its centre. And that it is, inevitably, unfinished. A programme cannot fix what the architecture refuses. But it can name what needs to change, make space for what has been excluded, and propose—through dialogue, formats, the joyful act of doing things differently—an accessible museum is possible. For DAG Museums, this proposition is about a way of working and it felt like the right place to start.

References:

1. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, Act No. 49 of 2016 (India).

2. Press Information Bureau. (2025, December 2). India's commitment to disability rights. Government of India. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2197426®=3〈=1

3. Taylor, M. (2014). Disability: A toolkit for museums working towards inclusion. Cultural Heritage Without Borders.

4. Krasny, E., & Perry, L. (2023). Curating with Care. Taylor & Francis.

5. Singh, V. (2024). The Lexicon of Disability Studies.

6. Seibers, Tobin. Disability Theory. The University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor, 2008.