Crafting Experiences: The Art of Developing Culture into Tourism Products

India is often described not as a country but as a continent of cultures stitched together. Every few hundred kilometres, the dialect shifts, the cuisine changes, and the architecture takes a new form. For tourism professionals, this diversity is a goldmine. But raw culture isn’t a tourism product. It has to be carefully selected, interpreted, and packaged into experiences that travellers can engage with, without the culture itself being damaged in the process. This is where the real craft of cultural tourism lies.

What does it mean to develop culture as a product? 🔗

A “tourism product” is anything a visitor pays time, money, or attention to experience. Culture, in its raw form, is simply the way a community lives. To turn it into a product, we have to identify the elements that outsiders find meaningful, present them in an accessible format, and ensure the experience is authentic enough to be valuable.

This is more delicate than designing a theme park or a beach resort. A water slide doesn’t have feelings. A community of weavers, dancers, or temple priests does. Developing culture as a tourism product demands creativity to make it engaging, and sensitivity to ensure the people behind the culture aren’t reduced to props. The goal is to offer enriching, authentic experiences while respecting the origin and significance of every cultural element on display.

The three buckets of cultural raw material 🔗

To make this process manageable, cultural elements can be grouped into three broad categories. These act as the raw materials a tourism developer works with.

The first is lifestyle and living patterns: what people wear, eat, how they organise their families, and what their daily routines look like. The second is tangible heritage and art forms: the physical evidence of culture, including architecture, archaeology, paintings, sculpture, and crafts. The third is beliefs, history, and customs: the spiritual and historical narrative of a region, covering religious rituals, festivals, myths, and oral traditions.

Most successful cultural tourism products blend at least two of these. A heritage hotel, for example, fuses tangible heritage (the building) with lifestyle (living like a royal). A spiritual circuit blends beliefs with tangible heritage. The art lies in choosing the right combination for the right audience.

Lifestyle as a product: the Rajasthan example 🔗

Rajasthan is perhaps the country’s most polished example of how lifestyle can be packaged into tourism. The desert state is, by area, India’s largest, and its culture has been shaped over millennia by an arid climate, warrior history, and a vibrant patchwork of tribes and royal courts.

What makes Rajasthan such a strong cultural product is that nothing about its lifestyle feels staged. The bright turbans, the swirling ghagras, the silver jewellery, the food that can survive without refrigeration-these are responses to real conditions. Rajasthani cooking was shaped by the warlike lifestyles of its inhabitants and the arid region’s limited ingredients, which is why dishes like Dal Baati Churma and Ker Sangri travel so well in stories and on plates.

Packaging the desert lifestyle 🔗

Tourism developers have responded with a spectrum of products. At one end are immersive village experiences and cultural villages like Chokhi Dhani, where visitors eat on the floor, watch Kalbelia and Ghoomar dances, and listen to folk songs around a fire. At the other end is the conversion of palaces into heritage hotels-a brilliant fusion that saves the buildings from decay while offering tourists a taste of the royal life.

The strategy clearly works. Rajasthan continues to attract roughly fifteen percent of all foreign visitors arriving in India, with tourism contributing about eight percent of the state’s domestic product, and many old palaces and forts have been converted into heritage hotels. Hotel industry data from 2023 indicates these heritage properties recorded average occupancy near 80%, well above the national average of around 65%, suggesting that travellers are willing to pay a premium for properties that anchor them in a sense of place.

Tangible heritage as a product: archaeology and architecture 🔗

India’s depth of history is its second great gift to cultural tourism. The country has 43 UNESCO World Heritage Sites at last count, and the inventory of forts, temples, stepwells, and ancient cities runs into thousands.

The trick with tangible heritage is interpretation. A fort on a hill, without context, is just an old building. A fort with a story-of the queens who lived there, the sieges it survived, the engineering that made it possible-becomes an experience.

From ruins to narrative: the case of Dholavira 🔗

Consider Dholavira in Gujarat’s Rann of Kutch. To the casual eye, it’s a remote stretch of ruined stone walls in a salt desert. But the story behind those stones is extraordinary. The ancient city was occupied between roughly 3000 and 1500 BCE and is one of the best preserved urban settlements of its period in Southeast Asia, featuring fortified zones, water reservoirs, a ceremonial ground and a sophisticated water management system. It was inscribed as India’s 40th World Heritage Site in 2021, becoming the first Indus Valley Civilisation site in the country to receive that honour.

The product here isn’t the bricks. It’s the narrative-how a civilisation built reservoirs in a desert, traded beads with Mesopotamia, and developed what may be the world’s earliest known signboards. Tourism interpretation, on-site museums, audio guides, and trained local storytellers are what convert silent ruins into a memorable experience.

Living monuments: the heritage hotel model 🔗

Dead architecture can also be revived through use. The transformation of forts and palaces into hotels-Umaid Bhawan in Jodhpur, Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur, and dozens of smaller havelis-is one of the most successful examples of adaptive reuse in the country. The buildings get the income they need for upkeep, and visitors get to inhabit history rather than merely look at it.

Beliefs and customs as a product: the spiritual circuit 🔗

Faith is arguably the most powerful cultural product available to Indian tourism. Pilgrimage has been a reason for travel here long before “tourism” was a word, and the country is dense with sacred geography-Hindu temples, Buddhist stupas, Jain tirthas, Sikh gurudwaras, Sufi dargahs, churches, and synagogues.

The product here is not just the building. It’s the act of faith inside it. The Ganga Aarti at Varanasi, the silent chanting at Bodh Gaya, the bustling joy of the Pushkar fair-these are experiences that even non-religious travellers find moving. The challenge for tourism developers is to make these experiences accessible without commercialising them into emptiness.

Government infrastructure for spiritual tourism 🔗

India’s central government has invested significantly in this segment. The PRASHAD scheme-Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual, Heritage Augmentation Drive-was launched to identify pilgrimage sites across the country and develop them in a planned, sustainable manner for an enriched religious tourism experience. As of recent reporting, 48 projects have been sanctioned across 27 states and union territories under the scheme, focusing on livelihoods, cleanliness, security and accessibility at identified pilgrimage destinations.

Alongside PRASHAD, the Swadesh Darshan scheme has built thematic tourist circuits-Buddhist, Sufi, tribal, heritage, and so on-that string together multiple destinations into curated journeys. The Buddhist circuit, for example, follows the Buddha’s life from Lumbini through Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and Kushinagar, turning faith and biography into a coherent travel itinerary.

Festivals as time-bound products 🔗

Customs and festivals add another dimension. The Pushkar Camel Fair, Hornbill Festival in Nagaland, Hemis in Ladakh, the Khajuraho Dance Festival, and the Kumbh Mela are all calendar-driven cultural products that draw enormous footfalls. India recently hosted the Maha Kumbh Mela at Triveni Sangam in Prayagraj from January to February 2025, with more than 66 crore devotees taking a holy dip during the event-a scale that virtually no secular event in the world can match.

Principles for ethical product development 🔗

Across all three buckets, certain principles separate good cultural tourism from exploitative variants.

Authenticity over performance 🔗

The moment a culture starts performing exclusively for tourists, the very thing that made it valuable begins to die. Good cultural tourism showcases life as it is lived, with minor adjustments for accessibility, rather than constructing entirely artificial spectacles.

Community participation 🔗

Cultural tourism works best when locals are stakeholders, not service staff. Models like community-based tourism in Sikkim, the Hodka village experiment in Kutch, and homestay programs in Spiti have demonstrated that when residents own the product, the quality, dignity, and revenue retention all improve.

Drawing the line 🔗

Some cultural elements should remain off-limits. Sacred rituals, mourning ceremonies, and certain tribal practices are not products to be consumed. Heritage and cultural sites can be physically fragile and prone to interpretive bias when handled as tourism destinations, which makes thoughtful management essential. Knowing what to leave alone is as important as knowing what to package.

Conservation as a non-negotiable 🔗

Tourism revenue should fund the preservation of the very assets it relies on. Without that loop-earnings flowing back into restoration, training, and community welfare-cultural tourism eventually consumes its own raw material. The Tourism and Culture Division at NITI Aayog explicitly works on developing, preserving and promoting India’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage with greater policy and planning coherence, recognising that promotion and conservation must move together.

Bringing it all together 🔗

Developing culture into a tourism product is essentially a curation exercise. You start with the everyday-how a community lives, what it has built, what it believes-and you choose which fragments to highlight, how to tell their story, and how to deliver them to a visitor without distorting the source.

For India, the possibilities are practically limitless. From Harappan ruins to Maharashtrian Warkari processions, from Manipuri Ras Lila performances to Kerala’s Theyyam rituals, from Rajasthan’s puppet villages to Nagaland’s morungs, every region has multiple layers of culture waiting to be interpreted with care. The responsibility, as the field grows, lies with tourism professionals to handle this product the way it deserves-with creativity, depth, and a deep respect for its origin.

What do you think? If you were tasked with developing a new cultural tourism product in your home district, which lifestyle, heritage, or belief-based element would you choose to package-and how would you ensure the local community remained at the centre of the experience? And where, in your view, should tourism developers draw the line between sharing culture and commodifying it?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_Rajasthan
2. https://rana.org/about-rajasthan/
3. https://www.hotelierindia.com/travel/cultural-tourism-the-driving-force-of-indias-growing-hospitality-sector
4. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1645/
5. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-news-analysis/india-s-40th-world-heritage-site-dholavira
6. https://tourism.gov.in/prashad-scheme
7. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2113287
8. https://research-advances.org/index.php/RAJMSS/article/viewFile/1972/1451
9. https://www.allresearchjournal.com/archives/2016/vol2issue10/PartD/2-9-133-915.pdf
10. https://niti.gov.in/divisions/division/tourism-and-culture