India Is Digitising Culture. Brands Still Need a Permission Layer: The Cultural Asset Passport

India is getting better at digitising culture. That does not automatically make culture usable—or ethically reusable—by designers, publishers, educators and brands. A scan can be searchable yet impossible to license. An object can be visible yet stripped of community context. A designer can find an image and still have no responsible path to permission, credit or a new commission.

The upgraded Indian Culture Portal, launched in March 2026, is an important piece of infrastructure. The Ministry of Culture says Version 2.0 offers content in 22 Indian languages through BHASHINI, advanced search, an AI chatbot, progressive-web-app access and institutional integration through standard metadata exchange and APIs. That is a major discovery layer. The next creative-economy question is what happens after discovery.

Another emerging initiative shows why metadata matters. In July 2026, the Manuscripts and Inscriptions Digitisation Foundation reported 2,107 manuscripts and 698 inscriptions across more than 11 languages in its repository, arguing that a scan becomes searchable, citable and comparable only through structured metadata. Preservation and reuse are different jobs, but reuse cannot be responsible without that foundation.

The proposal: a Cultural Asset Passport

The Cultural Asset Passport is a speculative Afternoon framework, not an existing government programme or industry standard. It is a compact record that travels with a digitised cultural asset and answers five questions before creative reuse: Where did it come from? Who can authorise use? What context must remain attached? How must credit and value travel back? What new work could be commissioned instead of copied?

The passport should not turn every cultural object into commercial inventory. Some material should remain restricted, sacred, private, community-governed or unavailable for derivative use. Its value is precisely that it makes those boundaries legible rather than treating online visibility as permission.

Field 1: Origin

Record the institution, collection, maker or community when known, location, approximate date, material, object history and digitisation source. Unknowns should be marked as unknown, not filled with attractive guesswork. Origin gives a designer enough information to understand that an image belongs to a history rather than a moodboard.

For living traditions, origin cannot stop at a state label. “Rajasthan” or “the Northeast” is not adequate provenance. The record should identify the relevant practice, locality, contributors and the limits of institutional knowledge.

Field 2: Rights

State the copyright status, owner or custodian, permitted uses, restrictions, territory, duration, alteration rules, approval contact and expected response time. Separate access rights from reuse rights. A public-domain underlying work can still involve rights in a new photograph, personal data, cultural sensitivity or institutional terms.

The rights field needs plain language and machine-readable values. Designers should be able to filter for research-only, editorial, educational, commercial, adaptable and permission-required material without pretending those categories solve every ethical question.

Field 3: Context

Explain meaning, use, terminology, contested interpretations and elements that should not be isolated. Link to fuller scholarship and community-authored accounts. Context is not a decorative paragraph; it is a creative constraint that can prevent a motif from being detached from ceremony, status, grief, worship or ownership.

The 2026 SSAF–Asia Art Archive research grant explicitly encourages documenting and annotating regional-language visual and cultural print material through innovative methods, and marks the eighth year of the collaboration. That emphasis on annotation is a useful reminder: interpretation is part of access.

Field 4: Credit and value return

Provide the preferred credit line, names that must remain visible, a citation link, attribution placement and any fee or benefit-sharing expectation. If commercial reuse requires payment, show how value is distributed. If the original maker is unknown, the passport should not erase the institution or community that preserved the material.

Credit should survive every format: packaging, campaign films, captions, retail displays, press notes and internal decks. A link hidden on a legal page is not equivalent to meaningful attribution.

Field 5: Commission path

The most interesting field asks whether the user should commission a contemporary practitioner rather than reproduce an archival image. It can list relevant studios, artisan organisations, researchers, translators or community contacts who have chosen to receive enquiries. This turns the archive from an extraction surface into a starting point for living work.

The commission path must be opt-in and maintained. It should not publish personal contacts without consent or appoint an institution as the sole voice for a diverse practice. Its function is to create a responsible next step, not a gatekeeping monopoly.

A worked example: a speculative home-furnishing brief

Imagine an Indian home-furnishing brand researching historical block-printed textile records. This is a proposal, not a real campaign. The brand finds a digitised fragment through an archive. Its passport identifies the collection and locality, indicates that the scan is available for research but commercial adaptation needs approval, links to context on the printing tradition, specifies credit and introduces an opt-in cluster organisation for a contemporary commission.

The creative team now has choices. It can license the archival reproduction, commission a new pattern with practitioners, or abandon the reference if the context makes reuse inappropriate. The final product page can carry the maker relationship and process, not a vague claim of being “inspired by India.”

How to build a pilot

Select 100 heterogeneous assets from one participating collection. Include easy and difficult cases: known and unknown makers, public-domain and restricted material, objects with living-community relevance and records with incomplete metadata. Build the five fields, recruit archivists, rights specialists, designers and community reviewers, then test real research tasks.

Measure whether users can determine permission without emailing multiple departments, whether credit survives production, whether rights enquiries receive answers, whether commissions reach practitioners and where the system correctly prevents reuse. The pilot’s success is not maximum downloads. It is better decisions with fewer invisible harms.

Frequently asked questions

Is an online image free for a brand to use?

No. Visibility does not establish copyright status, permission, cultural suitability or the rights attached to the digital photograph. Check the asset’s specific terms and obtain advice when necessary.

Is the Cultural Asset Passport a legal licence?

No. It is a proposed information layer. Formal licences, contracts, community protocols and applicable law still govern use.

Who should maintain the passport?

The holding institution should own record maintenance, but rights holders, researchers and relevant communities need structured ways to correct, restrict or enrich it. Each update should be dated and attributable.

The Afternoon view

This framework represents Ritwik Joshi’s opinion. It is deliberately offered as a testable opportunity space, not as a claim that the system already exists or has been commissioned.

If your institution or brand is opening an archive to creative use, Afternoon can help design the metadata, permission journey and commissioning experience before the first campaign brief arrives. Explore our other India-focused perspectives or discuss a pilot with us.