Mumbai: For an uninitiated Westerner, making your way to one of this city’s new art galleries can be a disorienting study in contrasts. In the crowded streets behind the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, where the air is heavy with the smell of gasoline and flowers, you are approached by women begging for money and food. Men shout invitations to enter their carpet shops or purchase wares such as watches, magazines, leather jackets and cigarettes.
Then, from a narrow thoroughfare, you enter a courtyard where an old man sits wearing a black security uniform. He speaks no English but, when asked for directions, points towards a flight of wooden stairs so worn they are bowed in the middle. At the top, a door is opened by a barefoot woman in a scarlet sari. Behind her is an art gallery as white and sleek as any space in Chelsea.
These contradictions do not arise from any calculated exoticism. This is simply the new India.
“It isn’t as if we are not aware of what is happening in New York or Berlin or in China,” the dealer Usha Mirchandani said in an interview at the gallery. “It is just that we find ourselves in a new position, and we must find our own way.
New scene: More and more galleries are opening up or refashioning themselves as money pours in and Indian art get a lot of attention, both here and abroad. This renewed energy is evident in Gallery Espace (above) in New Delhi and Sakshi Gallery (below) in Mumbai.
“We are an old civilization. We have untold treasures. But what has happened here in the last year and a half has changed things, with the economy booming and so much art being sold and the prices just going off the graph.”
The Indian art world has more than changed. It has exploded. Prices have increased 10-fold since 2002. In the last two years alone, they have nearly doubled. Works by India’s top-selling contemporary artists—Atul Dodiya and Subodh Gupta are the names most often cited—can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars. The auction price of paintings by the older generation of great Indian modernists such as M.F. Husain or F.N. Souza can easily pass a million dollars— hardly uncommon for leading Western artists but staggering in a country where the average income among the 1.1 billion residents is about $820 (about Rs32,400) a year.
Although the usual metaphors are marched out to describe the new art scene—a Wild West, a gold rush—there are signs that speculators have begun to pull back since the government imposed new capital gains taxes on art sales. Still, the global art world is enthralled. The abiding fascination with China’s modish new art has now spread to its southwestern neighbour, with international dealers and curators flocking in to discover talent.
In the next few weeks alone, at least seven large-scale exhibitions of contemporary Indian art will open in Italy, Switzerland and the US.