The unusual art collector

For someone who owns the largest collection of artworks by Bhupen Khakhar in the country, Vijay Kumar Aggarwal's affinity for the maverick Baroda-based artist began quite by chance.

"One day Siddhartha Tagore [promoter of the Art Deal Auction House in Delhi], who used to sell me Bengal school paintings, came to me with 20 paintings, and said you must buy these. I said, but I don't buy the Moderns, not even Husain or Raza; you think I will buy one of the contemporaries..." recounts the septuagenarian Delhi-based art collector who has set up a foundation, Swaraj Art Archive, to house his own extensive collection, and also that of his father's, Seth Jai Prakash, of Kalighat pats, Bengal School paintings, British India prints, rare vintage China and cut glass, old wooden artefacts and antique furniture.

Tagore, says Aggarwal, continuing the story of his encounter with Khakhar, told him – "Vijayji you take this. Khakhar is only collected by foreigners, and never sell it." Sceptical initially, because, as he says, "I do not understand contemporary art", Aggarwal was later convinced when he saw the amount of attention Khakhar's works got at a show he organised at his daughter-in-law's gallery in Singapore. Soon, Khakhar became a passion, and Aggarwal began picking up works wherever he found them.

That was around 15 years ago.

The ongoing show of Khakhar at Swaraj Art Archive has 128 works, including a few rare ceramics, a number that is just shy of the 140 shown at the 2016 exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), a collection that had been loaned to it from the artist's estate.

Aggarwal never met Khakhar, who died in 2003. "He was in Gujarat, I was in Delhi and by that time I had stopped travelling. I had retired." He's also kept away from what many consider to be the distinguishing feature of Khakhar's art – his homoeroticism. "I don't buy erotic paintings. I have some, but not the most explicit ones."

In many ways, Khakhar's kitschy, post-modern aesthetic is an aberration in Aggarwal's collection. "My love was the Bengal school; the Bombay School, Company School paintings and prints, and old photographs," he says. As a collector, Aggarwal seems to buy widely, without prejudice to distinctions of high and low, medium, or artist's repute. He points with as much pride to an architectural drawing of the Rani Sipri Mosque in Ahmedabad, done sometime in the late 1800s by students of the JJ School of Art, as he does to a British-era print of Pune that he picked up recently on his travels. He has a collection of works by obscure painters, sourced from exhibitions at Jehangir Art Gallery and Lalit Kala Akademi. "I have a passion for art, especially neglected art," says Aggarwal.

Rajeev Lochan, artist and former NGMA director who has curated the Khakhar show at Swaraj Archive says,that Aggarwal is that rare collector "who has trained his intuition to identify what is interesting and good not only today, but in the times to come."

Khakhar, Aggarwal says, was neglected until a few decades ago. "Check the auction catalogues from 20 years ago – there were paintings by him priced at $500 and $1,000 that remained unsold." But, he says, "I don't go after Husain – for that price I can buy 20 others who are being neglected by today's elite."