Asian Antique Shop

Indian antiques are the art world’s newsmakers

Written by admin on September 5, 2009 – 6:51 pm -

Anindita Ghose

As the recession bursts the contemporary art bubble, a hidden star comes to the fore. Indian antiques are the art world’s newsmakers
Naman Ahuja, associate professor of Indian art and architecture at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, knows his antiques. Seated in his sunlit home office, with a magnificent 5ft 9-inch Shrinathji Pichvai from Rajasthan on the wall behind him, he speaks passionately of Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts exhibit that opens in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) on 10 October. Ahuja is all praise for the sophisticated curatorial focus involved in putting together the exhibition, but he is livid at the stringent Indian laws that would make an exhibition of this scale difficult to organize in the country.

It is for the same reason that he calls antiques the silent stars of the Indian art market. “They’ve held their own despite (the) dual problems of the economic downturn and the strangulating laws that govern their trade and exchange in India,” says Ahuja.

The Maharaja exhibit is an ambitious undertaking. Not only is V&A exhibiting objects from its own collection, but a number of artefacts are on loan from the royal collections of erstwhile princely states such as Udaipur, Jodhpur, Bikaner, Baroda, Bahawalpur, Gwalior and Kapurthala. Extremely rare artefacts, such as crystal pieces from the Maharana of Mewar’s collection—the largest private crystal collection in the world—will be part of the three-month show. There will be a book, guided tours, a recreation from a royal procession and a symposium. Curator Anna Jackson, deputy keeper of V&A’s Asian department, says the exhibition has been in the planning for around four years and took two years of extensive paperwork. Though the museum is not concerned explicitly with the dynamics of the art market, Jackson hopes that the broad range of artefacts on display will boost awareness and clear the shroud of mystery that surrounds Indian antiques and their undocumented provenance.

But the international market for Indian antiques has been thriving even without such impetus. It has a small but dedicated collector base dominated by European and American connoisseurs, including museums and non-resident Indians.

Sotheby’s auction house has been selling Indian, Himalayan and South-East Asian antiquities for over five decades at Asian art sales in New York and London. Its upcoming auction on 17 September in New York includes rare miniatures from the collection of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), a pioneering figure in the field of Indian and South-East Asian art. Coomaraswamy established the first department of Indian art in a US institution at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he was curator from 1917 to 1937. He was particularly known for his scholarship in Indian miniatures.

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