Swaminarayan Museum 4.18

The Shree Swaminarayan Museum is a museum in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. It houses of Three thousand personal objects of Swaminarayan, who is believed to be a manifestation of god in Swaminarayan Hinduism. It is a project undertaken to protect God Swaminarayan's objects of Prasadi (personal objects) which can be viewed by all people for darshan.This is the first ever project in the Swaminarayan Sampraday to create this unity in all of God Swaminarayan's Prasadi objects from temples all over the world and will be a 175000sqft complex built on 30000sqyd with a total project cost of 10.5 Million. This museum was envisioned former Acharya Tejendraprasad of the Narnarayan Dev Gadi.HistoryDuring his lifetime, when Lord Swaminarayan went around village to village, on request from his followers he gave his belongings as 'prasadi' to his followers. This 'prasadi' is passed from generation to generation, and is still owned by hundreds of families. Swaminarayan temples also have their own collections, but items are usually not kept in an organized manner. The people who pass through them have no historical information about these items. Acharya Tejendraprasadji Maharaj has endeavored to establish this museum of Swaminarayan's belongings. He had some personal collections of Swaminarayan, and dreamed of gathering the 'prasadi' from the devotees. He intended to put all this collection, which gave a glimpse of Swaminarayan's life, in the museum. To fulfill this dream he passed on leadership of the Narnarayan Dev Gadi to his son, Koshalendraprasad in order to give full attention to this project. He agreed to celebrate his 60th birthday only on one condition, that all the donation and proceedings given by the devotees will be passed on towards the realization of this museum. This was the founding stone of the museum.