Besides the Arna Jharna museum, Rupayan Sansthan manages an archive in Jodhpur city consisting of an extensive corpus, 7,078 hours, of audio-video recordings and a small, but significant, collection of photos from the areas of folklore, performing arts, sustainable living, indigenous knowledge, and arts and crafts. Over the years, Rupayan Sansthan has come to have a special association with the performing arts of Rajasthan, which has evolved within the wider framework of cultural engagement refined by Komal Kothari. Traditionally, the theme of regional culture is subsumed under the majoritarian concept of the nation state. The archive and the museum, on the other hand, offer a more profound understanding of the unique folk culture and regional identity of Rajasthan by documenting the life, leisure and labour of the people of the desert.
Eminent scholars from around the world, such as Dr John D. Smith (Emeritus Reader, Cambridge University), Prof. Susan Wadley (Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies and Director, South Asia Center, Syracruse University), Prof. Ann Gridzen Gold (Thomas J. Watson Professor, Religion, and Professor, Anthropology, Syracruse University), Vibeke Homma, Prof. Daniel Neuman (Mohindar Brar Sambhi Chair of Indian Music and Interim Director of the Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California) and Dr Subha Chaudhari (Archive and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, Gurgaon) have long been associated with Rupayan Sansthan and have made use of the archive.
Rupayan Sansthan invites scholars and researchers, institutions and departments to collaborate with it to document and conduct research on Rajasthan and western South Asia, oral history and folk culture.