Western tastes in Indian art are still driven by notions of the exotic. Thus, Mughal art objects fetch high prices

Two auctions, one at Christie’s and the other Sotheby’s, point to a paradox in the tastes of art collectors in the West. At Sotheby’s, Picasso’s Blue-period masterpiece, Boy with a Pipe, sold for a staggering $104,168,0000. This is the highest price ever paid for a painting. The previous highest was for Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr Gachet, which fetched $82.5 million in 1990. In Christie’s, on the other hand, gem-encrusted objets d’art brought back to Great Britain from India by Robert Clive fetched a whopping £5 million, which was more than three times their estimate. The paradox lies in the fact that while paintings by European modern masters are sold in auctions for record prices, the works of modern Indian painters do not attract the same kind of price. In terms of auction bids, modern Indian painters are nowhere in the big league. Yet, objects harking back to India’s Mughal past command values which are fabulous by any reckoning. In terms of the monetary value of art, India’s present still lags a huge way behind India’s past. This is a phenomenon that needs some analysis and explanation.

One kind of explanation could revolve around Western tastes regarding things Indian. The price that a Mughal jewelled jade flask and similar other objects fetched would suggest that the West is still allured by exotic India. For the Mughals, such a flask or a bejewelled dagger or a fly-whisk studded with rubies was an object of everyday use. Their sense of aesthetics and their opulence did not distinguish between articles to be used and articles to be collected as art objects. Thus the palaces in which they lived could be decorated with precious stones. The palace complex of Fatehpur Sikri is a magnificent example of the scale of their tastes as well as the way the artistic merged into the quotidian in their sensibility. What was considered of everyday use by the Mughals acquired exotic and fabulous dimensions when Britons like Robert Clive first encountered Indian culture. The opulence they saw was beyond their imagination. When accused of looting, Clive told the House of Commons, “Gentlemen, I stand amazed at my own moderation.” This confession is a clue to the wealth and the grandeur he encountered, and to the awe that they generated. Since that initial moment when Indian art objects met the Western gaze, India has become associated with the fabulous and the exotic. Modern Indian paintings, because their grammar and their techniques are all derived from the West, do not evoke such feelings of wonder. They are measured by the same yardstick that is used to value modern European paintings and are found wanting.

This is not to denigrate modern Indian painting but merely to point to a somewhat odd streak in the development of Western tastes. It is also to underline the effects of a particular kind of legacy. The merging of the everyday and the artistic suggested above has also resulted in a complete neglect of art objects in India. Nothing else can explain how Indian tourists deface a historic and beautiful building with silly graffiti. Indians have devalued their own art, ancient and modern. The West values that art, even if it does so on terms that are often inexplicable to oriental minds.