UK, October 1, 2025: There’s a boom in the modern Indian art market with sales totalling £96.2m at international auctions in the past fortnight. Saffronart, the market leader, almost doubled the maximum total for an Indian auction to $40.2m, while Sotheby’s and Pundole each totalled $25.5m and $18.3m with Christie’s trailing at $12.4m. All four were celebrated as “white glove” sales, where all the lots were sold.
Top prices have been achieved for a variety of artists. They were inevitably led by members of the ultra-safe Bombay-based Progressives Group, which began in the 1940s, with names such as F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain and V.S. Gaitonde. Records were also set however for later artists including Bhupen Khakhar, Mohan Samant, Arpita Singh Vivan Sundaram and Nalini Malani who have been attracting increasing interest at auctions, though there were few works from contemporary artists.
Competition between two top collectors helped to boost prices for some prime lots, notably at Sotheby’s auction in London on September 30 where Manjari Sihare-Sutin, co-head of South Asian art, said the £18.9m ($25.5m with premium) achieved was the department’s highest total in its 30-year history.
Two Souza works created a new record for the artist after a contest between Shankh Mitra from the US, who is a relatively fresh collector and was in the auction room, and Kiran Nadar who bids down the telephone for her large art museum in Delhi.
Bidding against Mitra, Nadar won the Emperor at a hammer price of £4.2m, ($6.9m with premium), beating the artist’s previous $4.89m record set at Christies in New York in March 2024.
A few lots later, in another tussle that began with nine bidders, Mitra set a higher record with Houses in Hampstead (above) at £4.6m ($7.57m with premium). This followed a Christie’s New York contest between th two collectors last March for a notable Husain work that Nadar eventually won for $13.75m. Mitra has also been buying extensively in other auctions, challenging Nadar’s success for many years at acquiring the best works by top artists. He is the ceo and chief investment officer of Welltower Inc, a real estate investment trust working in the healthcare sector…
*John Elliott is a former Financial Times journalist, who was based in New Delhi for over 25 years till May 2018. He is the author of “IMPLOSION: India’s Tryst with Reality” which, in its latest 2019 edition, reviews Narendra Modi first government. In Asia from 1983, Elliott was also a correspondent for The Economist, FORTUNE magazine and the New Statesman. He was in Hong Kong for six years (1988-94), initially as the FT correspondent and then as Public Affairs Adviser to the Chief Secretary of the territory’s government.
He now lives in London and writes for Asia Sentinel, a Hong Kong-based news platform https://www.asiasentinel.com. He also has a blog on South Asia current affairs called Riding the Elephant https://ridingtheelephant.word
Source – Riding The Elephant, 1 October, 2025.
