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But for young Amit, wrestling has been a childhood dream. "This is a sport that our ancestors played. Cricket only came here with the British," he says. When he was 8, he asked his parents for permission to join a wrestling gym known as an akhada. His 20-year-old brother was already training, so they agreed. "I'm so happy here. I get to play sports all day," he says. "I still have to go to school, though."
Forty minutes of a fast-moving game of soccer are followed by 30 minutes of short sprints between two clumps of trees about 50 yards apart. Then the young pehelwans flop on the field or gulp freshly squeezed orange juice. The older boys train with weights; the younger ones do flexibility exercises. A thick rope hangs from a banyan tree. Amit grabs the rope, tugs it once and then starts crawling up, his legs wrapped around the rope as he inches up. When he comes down, he vanishes inside one of the tents, emerging in a langot, a loincloth of sorts that pehelwans wear in the wrestling pit. After the long warmup, it's 7:40 a.m. and time for some wrestling.
Young pehelwans learn two basic techniques: Greco-Roman, in which they can grip their opponents only from the waist up, and Amit's favorite, a no-holds-barred technique. People here say their sport was the precursor to the freestyle wrestling that is practiced around the world today. Like generations of Indian wrestlers, Amit has been taught to treat the sport almost as a form of worship. Before entering the pit, he takes off his shoes. There he joins Sonu, who, though slightly older, weighs about the same, between 100 and 110 pounds. In the old days, both boys would have been slathered in oil, making it nearly impossible for them to get a grip on each other until both had fallen in the dirt. Now they're wet only with their sweat.
"I like moving fast. Sometimes I get thrown, but not too often," Amit says upon coming out of the pit. Today, he hasn't been thrown at all. "Lucky day," he mumbles. It's about 8 a.m. -- time for the two to get dressed for school.
India's
Art Appreciation
5 June 2006,
Business Week
What has been the best investment in India in recent years? No, it's not an outsourcer such as Wipro, Tata, or Infosys. To get supercharged returns, you'd have done far better with a painting by Ram Kumar. A 6-foot-by-4-foot oil that sold for $32,000 in 2003 might fetch $500,000 today -- a 1,462% runup.
There has long been a global market for Indian miniature paintings, sculptures, and other antiquities, but interest in the country's modern art has lagged. Now, a robust economy, a new moneyed class, and the energetic participation of young expat Indians are boosting sales of contemporary Indian art to new highs. In April a new gallery opened in Bombay every week, and sellout shows are the norm in big cities across India. Jerry Rao, chairman of software outsourcer MphasiS BFL Ltd., shows his collection in the company's offices worldwide. In the past two years, investors have started at least four "art funds" in which a curator buys and sells artworks instead of stocks. And since March, Bombay's Economic Times has even published an "art index" aggregating prices for works by 51 top artists.
The excitement the new market is generating was palpable at the Saffronart Gallery in Bombay's old textile district on May 4. On display were India's contemporary masters: Krishna Howalji Ara and his nudes, Jogen Chowdhury's figures, Sayed Haider Raza's colorful geometrics, Francis Newton Souza's intense landscapes, Tyeb Mehta's mobile figures. The reserve prices for their works started anywhere from $100,000 to $700,000. On hand to sip wine and check out pieces that would later be auctioned over the Internet were artists, dealers, and veteran collectors -- plus more than a few art world newcomers. "You can't avoid the art market these days if you're a sensible investor," said Mehul Patel, a 27-year-old Indian tech entrepreneur based in Singapore, as he swirled a glass of chardonnay.
Today, Indians both at home and abroad believe investing in art can be as prestigious as a good address and as profitable as the stock market -- or more so. And why not? Prices for art have tripled across the board. At a Christie's auction in London last September, the hammer came down on Tyeb Mehta's Mahisasura -- an acrylic on canvas depicting an Indian goddess defeating a buffalo demon -- for $1.6 million. Since then, at least a half-dozen works by contemporary Indian masters have sold for $1 million-plus. "Today, people aren't buying art out of conviction or pleasure, but because they see money in it," says Dadiba Pundole, a gallery owner whose father launched top-tier artists in the 1960s and '70s.
Although most buyers are Indians -- usually successful expatriate entrepreneurs or professionals -- there's growing interest among non-Indians. The two largest collections are both outside India: Japanese food processing tycoon Masanori Fukuoka's 1,000-plus works are housed in a three-story museum near Kobe, while 1,200 works collected by the late Texas oilman Chester Herwitz reside in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. Christie's will hold five auctions of Indian contemporary art in 2006, up from three annually in recent years. New Delhi's Bodhi Art has a branch in Singapore and will open in New York in September -- adding to the city's six galleries already specializing in contemporary Indian work. And Indian expat buyers are becoming gallery owners: On Apr. 27, collector and tech entrepreneur Kent Charugundla opened TamarindArt in Manhattan with a sellout solo exhibit by abstract expressionist Bal Chhabda.
With prices soaring, artists are astonished. Jehangir Sabavala, an elegant, cravat-wearing 84-year-old and one of India's premier abstract painters, recalls his long years of struggle and marvels that prices are "beyond recognition."
For the first time, Christie's this year plans to include Indians in auctions in Dubai and Hong Kong. "It's about time we showcase Indian artists to a wider audience," says Yamini Mehta, who heads modern and contemporary Indian art at Christie's. "There's great quality in these works."
Fund will invest in art from India
31 May 2006, Bloomberg News
Neville Tuli is looking for $33.5 million to invest in what may be India's hottest market: art. Soaring prices for contemporary Indian works prompted the chairman of Mumbai-based Osian's Connoisseurs of Art Ltd. to start the nation's second art investment fund. Osian, with sale rooms in New Delhi and Mumbai, will start raising money on Monday, Tuli said in an interview. The minimum investment is $22,300 for three years, he said.
Days after the Mumbai stock exchange had its biggest weekly drop since 2001, a painting by Indian-born Francis Newton Souza sold at auction for a record $1.2 million. Prices of works by Indian artists such as Souza, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta are being driven up by a global surge in art investment, coupled with growth in Asia's fourth-biggest economy that has swollen the ranks of the nation's wealthy.
The most striking painting in New Delhi's National Gallery of Modern Art, India's premier collection, is up a flight of stairs, in a room on the first floor. Usually hanging in a distant corner, it gives you a jolt when it springs on you. It's a rectangular oil panel: a group of adolescent Brahmins, bare-chested and with gleaming, sacred threads dangling around their torsos, sit cross-legged against a burgundy background. One of them stares at you, one turns away, and the central figure, with a white-and-red paint mark on his forehead, looks beyond you, as if seized by an inspiration. The painting, Brahmacharis, is mesmerizing enough if you are a foreigner, but for any Indian, its power is multiplied by the glamour that surrounds the signature on the work: Amrita Sher-Gil.
Every artistic movement needs a Romantic hero—a precociously gifted individual who lives by different rules, paints or writes or sculpts outrageously well, and dies at a shockingly young age. Sher-Gil is modern Indian art's great Romantic. Part Indian and part Hungarian, beautiful and unconventional, she painted Brahmacharis in 1937, when she was 24. Just four years later she was dead, but she left behind a legend and a stunning body of work. After years of relative neglect, modern art is now going through an extraordinary boom in India. Entrepreneurs, engineers and stockpickers enriched by the nation's economic rise have discovered that abstract paintings can make for a good investment, and prices have soared for leading modernists like Tyeb Mehta, Ram Kumar. Until recently, though, Sher-Gil had been somewhat forgotten amid the excitement. Because her paintings were declared "national treasures" in the 1970s and cannot be taken out of the country, overseas Indians, the most lavish patrons of art, have avoided buying her works. All that changed in March, when an Indian businessman bought Sher-Gil's Village Scene for $1.6 million, the most ever paid for a work of art in India. This massive sale is focusing attention on Sher-Gil, as is a new biography, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life, by art historian Yashodhara Dalmia.
Born in Budapest to a Hungarian mother partly of Jewish extraction, and a Sikh father, Sher-Gil studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she absorbed influences from Gaugin to contemporary Hungarian art. At age 21, she settled in India, which had seen nothing like her. Most men who met her became infatuated; her numerous lovers included British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, and perhaps even Jawaharlal Nehru, India's future prime minister. Rumors grew furiously but Sher-Gil doesn't seem to have cared. Her self-portraits, are icons of Indian feminism, show a cheerful, exuberant woman, confident in her sexuality.
Sher-Gil was prolific in a short life, and some of her work seems hastily composed. But in her best paintings, brilliant details combine to create a timeless monumentality. In The Haldi Grinders, a group of women engaged in a mundane activity, crushing turmeric, are obscured by trees, their bodies distilled into a clutch of hands that grip the crushing wheel; we spy on them and their vivid hands as if trespassing on a religious mystery. The young Brahmins of Brahmacharis, with their distinctive faces, look like so many who still sit beside temples in South India, yet they could also be ancient hierophants sharing a hushed secret. In such works, writes Dalmia, "the contemporary [is] elevated to the level of the classical." In a tragically brief career, Sher-Gil did much to introduce her country to the idea of the free-spirited artist, and to show them that art could interpret Indian life for Indians. As Dalmia puts it: "She introduced the modern into India."
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