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You could have knocked me (and I am far, far from petite) down with a feather. It was a rainy Sunday, the kind of day you rush into Museums or churches. So we barged into the Smithsonian’s imposing National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. As had hundreds of others: inside it was like Churchgate Station at high tide. Once done with all the dinosaurs, particularly the upgraded Triceratops exhibit, and the mammals, we were navigating our way out when we saw numerous signs for a Sikh Exhibit.

Was that a wrong spelling? What was an exhibition on the Sikhs doing amongst fossils, minerals and meteorites? Well, the signs were right. A bit like a frozen Republic Day float, the exhibition called “Sikhs: Legacy of the Punjab”, was comprised of “displays of Sikh paintings, jewellry, books, weapons, and other religious and cultural objects”. And alongside the display of a typical Sikh wedding, gurdwaras, bhangras el al, are a series of canvases by Delhi painter Arpana Caur.

I mention this because it makes me wonder whether contemporary Indian art has actually crossed the Lakshman Rekha of the exotic. Whether it has stepped out of the realm of the “Other”—as ever the stuff of cabinets of curiosities, or arty knick knacks picked up on travels overseas as souvenirs.

Certainly, the buzz about Indian contemporary art has been getting increasingly deafening. Each time the hammer comes down at Sotheby’s or at Christies in New York on a Tyeb Mehta, SH Raza, FN Souza or indeed on a Ram Kumar, there’s mayhem in the art market, with prices of the other works of these painters skyrocketing back home. Crossing the million dollar barrier has, in fact, now lost its novelty. Raza hit the jackpot with $1,472,000 at Sotheby’s for a 1972 work, Tapovan, with Mehta not too far behind with $1,248,000 for his 1988 work Falling Figure with Bird.

That’s all very well, but the real question is: do Indians remain the only buyers of contemporary Indian art? The art market hasn’t quite expanded beyond Indians and the Indian diaspora. Christies and Sotheby’s hardly had a white face amongst the paddle-raisers.

What is interesting, however, is the fact that the made-in-India Americans are being edged out by the FOP’s—fresh off the plane—desis from largely Mumbai and Delhi. As one NRI quipped: “There’s a joke going round here that whenever there’s a Christie’s or Sotheby’s auction of Indian art here the galleries are all shuttered up in India.” The NRI could be right: gallerists and art fund managers descend in droves on New York. For the arterarti, both buying and selling art and real estate is much the same thing: to be offloaded every few months.

There was another reason this year for the visitors to stay on longer. The Asian Art Fair in New York (now in its second year) for which A-list art dealers and cognoscenti converge. Happily this time there was an Indian name in the list of galleries participating. The Sundaram Tagore Gallery (it just moved from SoHo to the happening Chelsea) clocked in many visitors: among his stable of artists are New York-based Natwar Bhavsar and Anil Revri. Tagore’s repertoire, however, is more mainstream, more international.

American desis have to be more imaginative if they want to push Indian art, both contemporary and Asian, into the arc lights. Patronage is the well-trodden route, as some have realised. Indian names are finally beginning to appear on the walls of hallowed museums—on lists of donors. American museums have formidable Indian antiquities. Alas, most of them never see the light of day, banished to some distant storehouse of wallflowers, unlike Chinese and Japanese art, all preening and, well, a bit exhibitionist like supernova models strutting down the ramps of New York, Milan and Paris. So, it was not without a small amount of pleasure that I came across the names of Indians on a plaque in the two decent-sized rooms that constitute the Arts of the Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas in the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Homeless at the Freer, scattered throughout this prestigious museum, Indian art found a resting place two years ago after much lobbying by Rama and Arun Deva, who run a consulting firm in Maryland. Others like Mahinder Tak are associated with prestigious museums like the National Museum of Women in the Arts. American desis have a long way to go to catch up with our Asian neighbours: the Chinese have a headstart: there wasn’t even a whiff of a samosa at the Asian Art Fair, just things you put in with a chopstick into your mouth.

Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com