The IKKIVI Podcast: Exploring Fashion, Culture and Values · Nivi Murthy

S3E17: A New Era of Cultural Tourism Redefining Travel Experiences in India | Akshita Bhanj Deo

·53 min·3 clips

Boutique hospitality lets villages, artists, and farms share the money from one trip.

Travel is not just movement. She talks about India as a place with a lot to offer visitors, but the thread she keeps pulling is storytelling. A village walk can do more than fill an itinerary. For someone arriving from elsewhere, it can open up rural life through daily routines, conversation, and a closer sense of where they are. She is careful about the trap here. The point is not to make villages look quaint or turn people into props. It is to create contact that feels specific, respectful, and alive. Tourism can spread money around when it is handled well. She describes it as one of the few industries where income can move beyond one hotel or property and reach vendors, farms, and local workers. Culture also needs a real stage. At the property she describes, art forms and artists are part of the guest experience, so visitors meet the process instead of only seeing finished objects. The past keeps showing up. She recalls how, in the 1800s, the British disbanded royal armies in most princely states, and some traditions survived because people called them dance. That survival still needs attention. Women, she says, had not traditionally performed one local dance form, and now they are being taught so it does not fade out. Craft gets the same care. A sixth generation artist comes regularly to demonstrate one of India's oldest handicraft traditions, even when no one buys anything. That feels telling. The point is for visitors to see how the work is made, who carries it, and why it is more heirloom than souvenir. She also points to the Savantwadi palace in Maharashtra, where artists help protect and promote ganjifa playing cards. The cards carry memory, and she places them within a wider South Asian tradition. Cultural tourism, at its best, can bring people close enough to notice small histories before they disappear. The conversation ends gently: leave the city, walk through an Indian village, breathe, and let the country reset your attention.

As heard by us

A warm argument for travel that pays attention to people, place, and living tradition.

It frames tourism as storytelling, and the argument lands best when it stays close to village walks, rural life, and the small ways travel can feel personal instead of packaged.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want travel that feels rooted in real lives, not glossy sightseeing.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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