The Siddhagiri Museum near Kolhapur has over 700 statues in brick and cement and has drawn comparisons to Madame Tussauds. But the two couldn’t be more dissimilar

Till about two years ago, tourist buses and vans would cruise down the Mumbai-Bangalore highway, taking pilgrims to the 1,200-year-old Shiva temple in Siddhagiri Math and take them back the same highway. But now, they stop by for a day to visit the Siddhagiri Museum, a sprawling open-air museum of statues, which has often been compared by NRI bloggers to Madame Tussauds of London.

But if the wax figures at Madame Tussauds are all about glamour and power, the brick and cement statues at the Siddhagiri Math celebrate the country’s rich heritage and the Gandhian dream of a self-sustained rural India.

In February 2007, the head of the Siddhagiri Math, Adrushya Kadsiddheshwar Swamy, decided to develop a museum that captured the spirit of rural India. The Math got over 100 sculptors from Karnataka to work on the statues and, with help from villagers, set up the Siddhagiri Museum.

“We all keep talking about India’s past and our culture, but not many know much about it. Our educational system is skewed too. Our history books teach us what the British thought of our past,” says Adrushya Kadsiddheshwar Swami.

The museum, spread over eight acres, houses over 700 statues. One section of the museum is a cave that has statues of some of the greatest thinkers the country has produced. With some dramatic props and backgrounds, the museum has sculptures of yoga guru Patanjali; sage Kanada who founded the philosophical school of Vaisheshika; Charaka, considered the father of Ayurveda; Chanakya the economist-politician, Nagarjuna the metallurgist, Bhaskaracharya the mathematician and many more.

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