In April 2024, I wrote about a quiet paradox in the Indian art market: the striking absence of antiquities and classical Indian art from mainstream auctions. Despite India’s extraordinarily deep artistic past, stretching from medieval temple sculpture to the refined courts of the Mughals and Rajputs, auction catalogues were increasingly dominated by modern and contemporary art.
Yet, the tide may slowly be turning.
For a country with one of the world’s deepest artistic histories, the Indian auction market has always had a curious blind spot.
Walk into most sales in India, and the narrative is predictable: modernists dominate the walls, contemporary artists fill the catalogues, and the twentieth century reigns supreme. The centuries that came before—those of miniature ateliers, temple sculptors, manuscript painters, and courtly patronage—often appear only in passing, if at all.
This absence is striking because the international market tells a different story. Classical Indian art continues to command scholarly attention, institutional interest, and serious prices abroad. Yet within India itself, the ecosystem around these works remains comparatively underdeveloped. The supply is sporadic, the scholarship often scattered, and the market still searching for a steady platform.
Which is why the efforts of Todywalla Auctions have begun to stand out.
Known for decades as one of India’s most respected numismatic auction houses, the firm has in recent years turned its attention to classical Indian art. In doing so, it has entered a space that few Indian auction houses have explored with consistency.
The upcoming Classical Indian Art-4 sale is part of this growing endeavour.
What makes these auctions interesting is not merely the objects themselves, though the catalogues often range widely, a cornucopia of works: from miniature paintings and bronzes to devotional imagery and regional works from lesser-known schools. And now, even jewellery. Exquisite minakari pieces. It is the attempt to create a market context for them within India.
For decades, many such objects travelled a one-way route: leaving the country through colonial collecting networks, estate dispersals, and early twentieth-century dealers, only to surface generations later in European or American collections. When they appeared at auction, it was often in London or New York.
Indian collectors, ironically, encountered their own artistic history abroad.
The emergence of auctions dedicated to classical Indian art within India begins to subtly reverse that dynamic. It creates a point of return where objects that once circulated internationally can re-enter Indian collections, scholarship, and conversation.
This is not simply about commerce. Auctions, at their best, perform a kind of cultural documentation. Catalogues gather research, images, and provenance in one place; objects that may have lived quietly in private collections reappear briefly in public view. Each sale becomes a small archive of rediscovered material. The upcoming Classical Indian Art auction by Todywalla Auctions does this brilliantly. Each object (lot) is documented, with expansive essays, provenance, and documentation.
And perhaps more importantly, it expands the idea of what collecting in India can look like.
For too long, the Indian art market has been structured around modernism, around the familiar pantheon of twentieth-century masters whose works dominate auction headlines. That focus is understandable; it coincided with India’s economic rise and the emergence of a new collector base.
But it also created a narrow historical window. The story of Indian art did not begin in 1947 or even in 1900.
Long before that were the courts of the Rajputs and Mughals, the ateliers of Kangra and Bundi, the sculptural traditions of medieval temples, the manuscript painters of the Deccan, and the ritual bronzes of the South. These works form the deeper strata of India’s artistic imagination.
Reintroducing them into the auction ecosystem requires patience and persistence. It means cultivating collectors who may be encountering these traditions seriously for the first time. It means building scholarship, establishing provenance standards, and presenting objects in a way that connects history with connoisseurship.
That, in many ways, is the quiet value being added.
As Malcolm Todywalla observes, "Our catalogues follow a chronology of different schools and genres, from Pahari, Mughal, Rajasthani, Company school painting to Kushan and Pala Sculpture, a gap of several centuries between them. And with all of this put together, we are still just scratching the surface as far as the depth of Classical Indian art goes. Our aim is to showcase the best of what our heritage has to offer."
If these sales continue to grow, they may help reshape how the Indian market understands its own artistic past. Not by competing with modern and contemporary art, but by widening the frame, reminding collectors that India’s visual culture spans centuries, not decades.
In a market often driven by headlines and record prices, the revival of interest in classical Indian art may unfold more quietly.
But it may also prove to be one of the most important developments in the long run.