Building a Culture Stack: Using Technology to Revive India’s Artistic Heritage

Across India, artistic traditions carry centuries of knowledge, craftsmanship, and storytelling. From miniature paintings and classical music to regional crafts and oral histories, these cultural forms represent a vast and deeply interconnected heritage.

Yet many of these traditions are underrepresented in the digital world. While global culture circulates rapidly online, regional art forms often remain fragmented across scattered archives, private collections, or physical institutions.

At Bhaskar, we believe technology can play a transformative role in preserving and revitalising cultural heritage. Our work focuses on building what we call a Culture Stack - a set of digital tools and systems designed to support cultural preservation, discovery, and learning.

What Is a Culture Stack?

A Culture Stack is the digital infrastructure that enables cultural knowledge to be documented, organised, and experienced online. Much like a technology stack supports modern software development, a culture stack supports the digital life of artistic traditions.

It can include:

• digital galleries and archives

• structured cultural datasets

• multimedia documentation

• AI-powered discovery tools

• multilingual cultural knowledge systems

Rather than simply storing artefacts, a culture stack helps create living digital ecosystems for culture.

From Digitisation to Cultural Discovery

Many cultural preservation efforts focus on digitisation - scanning manuscripts, photographing artworks, or recording performances.

Digitisation is essential, but it is only the first step. But to truly preserve culture, digital systems must also support:

• contextual knowledge

• historical interpretation

• visual and narrative exploration

• connections between traditions

Technology can enable people not only to view cultural artefacts, but also to understand and rediscover them.

Reviving Interest in Regional Art Traditions

Regional art traditions often face declining visibility due to changes in patronage, education, and digital representation.

For example, the Kishangarh school of painting, known for its distinctive aesthetic and historical significance, remains relatively unfamiliar to many digital audiences today.

Through digital platforms and curated collections, it becomes possible to introduce new audiences to these traditions and present them in ways that highlight their artistic depth and historical context.

One example of this approach is the Bhaskar digital museum experiment, which explores how curated digital spaces can help audiences engage with regional artistic traditions. We believe that digital galleries like this can serve as entry points into deeper cultural exploration, especially when combined with research, storytelling, and educational content.

Technology as Cultural Infrastructure

Building digital platforms for culture requires a multidisciplinary approach. Cultural preservation is not simply a technical challenge. It involves historians, artists, archivists, technologists, and researchers working together.

At Bhaskar, our work in cultural preservation intersects with several broader areas:

• multimodal AI research

• language technology for cultural knowledge

• digital archiving and curation

• responsible AI frameworks for cultural data

Together, these initiatives aim to support cultural systems that are accessible, contextual, and sustainable in the digital age.

Toward a Digital Cultural Future

India’s cultural heritage is vast, diverse, and still evolving. Digital technology provides an opportunity not only to preserve that heritage but also to reintroduce it to new audiences. By building digital platforms that combine research, design, and AI, Bhaskar seeks to contribute to a future where cultural knowledge remains visible, accessible, and actively explored.

If you work in cultural preservation, museums, archives, art history, or digital humanities, we welcome opportunities to collaborate on projects that expand the digital culture stack.