When most people talk about the art market, they talk about the pieces by Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, and others that regularly sell for tens of millions of dollars. What those observers don’t talk about, most of the time, is South Asian art.

“Historically, in the larger art world, Indian art, Bangladeshi art, and Pakistani art has been severely undervalued,” art adviser and art dealer Arushi Kapoor told ARTnews. But that is starting to change as the prices for South Asian artists rise, even as talk of a market correction continues.

This past March, Sotheby’s brought in $19.8 million for its South Asian modern and contemporary art evening sale during Asia Week New York. Last year, the same sale made less than half that, just $7 million. In 2020, just before lockdown set in, Sotheby’s brought in $4.8 million at its South Asian modern and contemporary art evening sale during Asia Week. 

“This market has come a long way, even in the last four or five years,” Manjari Sihare-Sutin, vice president and worldwide co-head Sotheby’s modern and contemporary South Asian art department, told ARTnews.

Experts said there were several factors behind this rise in activity: more high-quality lots coming to auction, a growing collector base, and the shrinking availability of work by the Progressive Artists Group, a network of modernists that was active in post-Partition India.

Nishad Avari, the New York–based head of Christie’s South Asian modern and contemporary art department, which also brought in nearly $20 million for its Asia Week sale in March, described a sense of competition among collectors for works such as those. “They realized that if there are museums participating in the acquisition process, those works are never going to come back to market,” he explained. “So, they have to step up the level at which they compete.”

“There’s real demand from Indian citizens that don’t want to send the best works abroad,” Kapoor said. “They want to keep the best works in their house.”

And while the category has grown to include artists such as Nasreen Mohamedi, Nilima Sheikh, Zubeida Agha, and Zainul Abedin, the biggest sales have been and continue to be for works by male Indian artists.

These include new auction records for Indian modernists like S.H. Raza and F.N. Souza. At Sotheby’s, Raza’s painting Kallisté (1959) sold for $5.6 million on an estimate of $2 million to $3 million, smashing the artist’s previous record of $1.33 million set last March. At Christie’s, Souza’s The Lovers sold for nearly $4.9 million on an estimate of $700,000 to $1 million. The artist’s previous record of just over $4 million was for the 8-foot-wide painting Birth (1955), which also sold at Christie’s in September 2015.

Compared with the amounts typically seen in the Indian art market, “these are not small prices,” Sihare-Sutin said.

Other results were similarly high. At Christie’s, Gulammohammed Shiekh’s Portrait of a Tree (1975) sold for $1.38 million, more than $1 million above its high estimate. Meanwhile, at Sotheby’s, the late Bhupen Khakhar, a participant in the current Venice Biennale, was represented by the painting Hatha Yogi (1978), which sold for $1.8 million, more than double its high estimate. Neither work set a record, but these prices suggest that there is a good amount energy fueling the market for Indian art right now.

That energy is partially the result of efforts to study and acquire South Asian art at institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, Tate, and the Museum of Modern Art, themselves part of a larger attempt to expand the history of modernism. That’s evident right now in MoMA’s permanent collection galleries, where a work by Indian painter Mohan B. Samant hangs not far from a suite of paintings by Mark Rothko. MoMA acquired the Samant painting in 1963, but prior to the museum’s recent rehang, the piece hadn’t been seen in the permanent galleries since the year after the institution obtained it.

Sotheby’s is among the auction houses seeking to bounce off this institutional momentum. The house’s educational outreach efforts for its clients have included invitation-only guided tours of exhibitions of South Asian artists, like Shahzia Sikander’s show at New York’s Morgan Library in 2021. And in 2023, the year that Paris’s Centre Pompidou mounted a Raza retrospective, Sotheby’s staged a non-selling exhibition focused on the artist at its offices in London.

“No matter where someone entered the building, they could not miss the Raza exhibition,” Sihare-Sutin said. “We had contemporary clients come and look.”

The pieces coming up for sale tend not to be the product of flipping. “It’s 90 to 95 percent privately sourced, fresh-to-market property,” Sihare-Sutin said. “We have to be careful and cognizant of the ecosystem. The galleries are doing great work. We have to be responsible and think about who we want to sell it to.” 

Avari echoed this, saying his clientele is mainly long-term collectors. Like Sihare-Sutin, he said his focus was generally modern art over contemporary art. “We’re still establishing ourselves in the primary market,” he explained. “Unlike other categories, we don’t have that phenomenon of studio to auction block necessarily. These are all works that have been in established collections and traded hands a couple of times.”

(That hasn’t stopped advisers like Kapoor getting more inquiries from non-Indian international collectors about acquiring South Asian works as alternative investment assets. “There’s an opportunity currently to spend a certain amount of money to get a really good art piece, which also has significant upside,” she said.)

According to Sihare-Sutin, there’s a misconception that the market for South Asian modern and contemporary is a regional one. If you follow that logic, much of the interest in South Asian art should come from within South Asia itself. But, she said, this all fails to consider how large and successful the diaspora is in the United States.

“The CEO of every top company is Indian,” she pointed out.

When England decided to let go of its crown jewel 75 years ago, its rushed departure resulted in the unceremonious division of its Indian territories into three parts, with the Hindu-majority mainland becoming India, flanked by two Muslim-majority regions which became West and East Pakistan. The two ends of Pakistan were further partitioned in 1971, leading to the birth of Bangladesh in the East.

Lines drawn on maps decided the fate of millions and caused untold death and destruction. A region known for centuries of peaceful communion despite differing religious beliefs, cultures, foods, dress, languages, and rulers, was suddenly and arbitrarily torn asunder overnight.

In the wake of these violent acts, artists from the region drew, painted, designed, embroidered, and creatively reimagined their homeland’s numerous configurations for posterity.

Three-quarters of a century on, this has resulted in a rich legacy of work that can be loosely classified as “Partition art,” a tendency that captures both the negative and positive aspects of life after the traumatic events of 1947.

On the one hand, artists have focused on the discomfort of migration, the anxiety of displacement, the emotional scars caused by exposure to abject violence, hatred and fear, and the subjugation of women and other social minorities in propagation of false notions of honor. On the other, artists have also shown how invisible similarities between various communities exceed geographical divisions, exploring the deep and unfettered ties to the land of one’s ancestors and relationships that endure beyond religious splits.

At first, the mantle of documenting this phase of history lay with those who experienced Partition firsthand. Many could not bear to speak of it, but some captured what they witnessed in detail.

On fragile scraps of paper, Sardari Lal Parasher sketched the despair evident on scores of refugees he supervised in a transit camp in 1947. Satish Gujral caught the angst of survival in a haunting 1959 self-portrait where his sharp-featured visage, replete with furrowed brow, peeks out from a shroud-like garment, behind a skeletal figure. Pran Nath Mago sensitively painted the anguish of veiled women mourning a deep loss in Mourners (1950). Krishen Khanna showed the mental and physical despondency of sudden displacement from one’s home, through his painting titled Exodus (2007), where a tonga (horse-drawn cart) carries his family and all they hold dear, over “difficult and uncertain terrain,” as he once described it.

While those artists worked in a figural mode, others after them would take up Partition using the language of abstraction. S.H. Raza returned to the wound in his “Zamin” (Land) series from the 1970s, in which he painted in angry swathes of reds, browns, and yellows. Even without any figures present, these paintings manage to evoke an open wound. It’s a mode not entirely dissimilar from what appears in Zarina’s Dividing Line (2001), which denotes a contested border and a festering gash in equal measure.

A related wound appears to have barely scarred over in Jogen Chowdhury’s 2017 painting Partition 1947, in which a shaky line recalling the border drawn between East Pakistan and Bengal strikes a writhing body. Chowdhury is among the many artists who lived through Partition and has since returned to it in his art. His family moved from East Pakistan to Bengal, and in this painting, he alluded to the economic hardship faced by Bengalis forced to make their lives from scratch in West Bengal.

Artist Nilima Sheikh effectively drew on Urvashi Butalia’s oral history collection of survivor stories published in the late 1990s for her paintings titled Questions of Martyrdom 1 and 2 and Panghat Stories in the early 2000s. Here, Sheikh portrays startling images such as the well in the village of Thoa Khalsa that became a burial pit for hundreds of Sikh women and children who chose death over dishonor, as well as the decapitation of a girl by her father for similar reasons. “Urvashi questions whether this decision to be sacrificed was taken by the women themselves or forced on them in the guise of ‘honor’ of the family? Did the women have a choice?” Sheikh asked while speaking to ARTnews.

There is no doubt that firsthand accounts of Partition offer the richest detail, yet time and distance have the advantage of allowing objectivity. Therefore, in later years, second- and third-generation migrants have determinedly changed the artistic narrative in which Partition is portrayed by widening that lineage’s scope and redefining the messages relayed.

Manisha Gera Baswani conceptualized her cross-border Partition project “Postcards from Home” in 2015, on her second visit to Pakistan. She called on artist friends from both sides of the border to create 47 postcards, one end of which had a photograph of the artist taken by Baswani for another ongoing decades-long project “Artist Through the Lens,” and the other end recounted a story related to the partition. This also inspired her to create a series of works on paper that had pins driven through them, as well as a grouping of embroidered works, to highlight aspects of pain and healing.

Baswani said, “I often wonder what prompted me to create these huge projects on Partition, when I had never explored the subject earlier. Then I realized it’s always been part of my DNA, and it was just a matter of time. Whenever I have visited Lahore, I have felt a strong connection. Everything that was in my heart about separation has found its way into my work.”

Complementing this narrative of shared histories is Arpana Caur’s body of work, which is steeped in the visual imagery of destruction yet shows the power of love and hope in transcending divisions. In a painting titled The Great Divide (1997), she depicts two Indian freedom fighters, Bhagat Singh and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who seem to merge as one despite their diametrically opposed political views (the former advocated strong means to assert one’s message, while the latter ascribed to a policy of non-violence). They are flanked by the blood-soaked Partition trains of Caur’s childhood dreams. Lions rendered in the folk art style of Godna appear in the foreground, alluding to the strong character of the Singhs, who are members of the Sikh community to which Caur belongs. They were arguably some of the worst affected by the Partition in North India.

“Amid the culture, language, songs, and love stories that we share, one wonders: where does Partition figure?” Caur asked. “A line on paper that an Englishman drew erupts like a bleeding wound from time to time as some people want to keep the embers burning so that more pressing questions of hunger and poverty are pushed to the background.”

One of Caur’s most moving depictions of 1947, however, is of her own grandfather trudging on foot to Delhi from his native Lahore, surrounded by the same Godna lions. On his head, he carries the holy book of the Sikhs, the Guru Granth Sahib, with the stark imagery calling to mind the loss of everything he couldn’t carry with him.

In her ongoing series “Project Home: The Word for the World is Home,” begun in 2019, Seema Kohli also presents her family’s pre-Partition story. Inspired by her father Krishnan Dev Kohli’s autobiography, Mitr Pyaare Nu (To My Friends and Loved Ones), she put together a series that included a narrative performance, photographs, books on traditional medicine, and a sound installation extracted from songs sung by her aunts and father, along with ambient sound in Tamas (Inertia), a famed TV series about Partition from 1988. These pay ode to the memory of her father’s hometown, Pind Dadan Khan, and the medicinal knowledge which was lovingly preserved and practiced in her family of hereditary hakims (traditional doctors) for generations.

“The idea of expressing my family’s history possessed me,” Kohli explained. “At first, it was about sharing my inheritance with the rest of the family but as the social order of things were changing, it became about sharing the role my family played in the creation of a new nation—India.”

The preservation of the historic legacy of this period is a concept that resonates with young artists as well. The US-based Pritika Chowdhury’s series of “Anti-Memorial Projects” focus on feminist historiographies. Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, both from India, find solace in documenting the plight of traditional akharas (wrestling grounds) and poor farmers in Punjab—groups that were affected by the Partition and continue to be slighted by people in power.

Bangladeshi artist Sarker Protick’s nationwide projects—the first called Crossing captures the industrial ruins of the railway network built under the British regime and their lost glory, and the second, Jirno (Ruins), documents abandoned houses which belonged to wealthy landowning Hindus who moved after Partition—aim to preserve a history that has been largely ignored since the birth of Bangladesh.

Protick said, “With the passage of time, I can stand at a distance and look at the subject objectively, instead of feeling overwhelmed by the architecture or its sense of space.”

Sudipta Das’s family moved from Sylhet in present day Bangladesh to Assam in India, where the artist is now based. She compares the displacement her ancestors faced after leaving their cherished homeland to her personal experience of escaping the floods of the Brahmaputra River every year. Referring to her Korean dakjee doll installations which illustrate this movement, she says, “My work brings out my struggle—the loneliness and insecurities of migration.”

Encouraging interest on the subject in children is another consideration that drives Partition art. The ReReeti Foundation, an organization from Bengaluru that works to make museums accessible to everyone, has launched the Retihas project to educate students through a number of interactive modules. In one of these, users navigate animated storylines of people who experienced Partition, to reach a number of possible endings, both tragic and hopeful. The animation recreates exacting details of dress, food, and cultural traits to bring that time of history to life. 

From being a cataclysmic event that evaded serious documentation for many years to becoming a fixture in popular culture: when it comes to art, Partition’s legacy has changed many times, and will likely continue to do so as time goes on.

Pakistani artist and activist Salima Hashmi said of the continued attraction of the subject, “The issue of Partition keeps re-emerging with the third and fourth generation today. Even though they don’t have those immediate memories, they do carry the stories that were handed down to them.”

Years later, the circle returned into the artist’s life, this time drawn by S.H. Raza himself on his now iconic paintings depicting the bindu. Sanskrit for “drop,” “point,” or “grain,” a bindu is a symbol of the cosmos and the point of all creation in Indian philosophy. S.H. Raza’s black bindus burst and anchor his abstract geometric paintings in burning yellows, oranges, greens, and reds. They are setting and rising suns within interior, symbolic landscapes, where lines of poetry in Hindi or other vernacular languages sometimes emerge.

These masterpieces, including explorations of his native land, are characteristic of Raza’s paintings made primarily between the 1960s and the ’80s, and make for fiery, swift entry points into his creations. They speak their own, mysterious language in dialogue simultaneously with his Western contemporaries and his Indian heritage. They are also an overripe introduction to the often miscategorized and under-recognized universe of modern Indian art, of which S.H. Raza was a leading figure.

In a belated effort to help rectify that, S.H. Raza’s paintings have been united in a rare, though restrained gathering of some 90 paintings at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, on view until May 15. The exhibition is a first retrospective for the artist in France, where he lived from 1950 until 2011, and highlights his earlier, lesser-known experimental works. Unfortunately, his groundbreaking abstract geometric ­paintings, which reach their crescendo in the early ’80s, are introduced relatively late into the exhibition and feel under-represented as a result. Still, seeing S.H. Raza’s painterly progression, fleshed out in this chronologically organized exhibition, reveals a fascinating life of artistic question and response, battled out on canvas.

During his time in France, S.H. Raza traveled to India annually, effectively straddling both continents, and refusing to be pinned to either. He “lived with a dual belonging, and a dual consciousness,” said Roobina Karode, director and chief curator of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, a significant lender to the exhibition. “He really did not like how people said he was an Indian painter in Paris. He was trying to reach out to the cosmos, to embrace the entire thing, and break that narrow vision.”

Raza is among India’s most celebrated artists, and a co-founder of the country’s renowned Progressive Artists Group (PAG), along with M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, S.K. Bakre, and others. Formed on the eve of Indian independence in 1947, the group rebelled against previous, colonial-era artistic movements such as the Bengal School of Painting, which focused on “true Hindu art,” or works “free of colonial infection,” as Partha Mitter writes in 20th Century Indian Art, a recent survey published by Thames & Hudson.

Instead, PAG artists explored what a new national identity might entail. They looked to Indigenous philosophical and artistic traditions, while also embracing a form of internationalism that was curious about Western art, but not derivative of it, as is often misunderstood.

PAG artists “were struggling with wanting to be seen globally, beyond India, because they felt they were equally competent, and equally involved in the practice of modernism,” Karode told ARTnews. “They were open to influences, but they were actually trying to make meaning of what it was to be modern in their own context.”

And, as Karode pointed out, Eastern philosophy heavily influenced European modernism. “This traversing of influences is happening all the time, but [historiographies tend to say] it always started from the West. What comes out of [India], doesn’t get equally acknowledged, and that acknowledgement is something these artists were passionately working toward,” she said. “It was not a one-way street.”

The Pompidou exhibition’s curator, Catherine David, agreed the “derivative question comes up for every modern artwork that is not from the self-proclaimed centers of modernity. It’s very complicated to deconstruct, but we’re working on it.” As early as the 19th century, Indian artists used their own modes of expression “that are not in any way replicas,” forming a body of modern and contemporary art that is quintessentially figurative, she explained.

Raza, however, took a peripheral course to that of his Indian peers, despite maintaining a close bond to his artistic cohort and origins. He distanced himself from their dominant figurative art, moving toward abstraction. In the exhibition, this development is illustrated from rarely seen early watercolors on paper, depicting Indian cities, female figures, and geometric landscapes devoid of people, reminiscent of Bernard Buffet, van Gogh, Gauguin, and fellow PAG member and friend, F.N. Souza.

Works in this mode brought Raza relative early recognition, particularly during the years he was more closely associated with the Paris School of artists. He was the first non-European artist to receive the Prix de la Critique in 1956, and he exhibited in major international cities, including the Venice Biennale in 1956. The gallery Lara Vincy represented him in France, and he enjoyed widespread visibility in India as well. In 1959 he married French artist Janine Mongillat (1930–2002), whom he met through friends from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris, where he studied on scholarship from 1950 to 1953. Unfortunately, none of Mongillat’s intriguing artworks, including strange, painted sculptures and collages made from found objects and paper mâché, are included in the exhibition to highlight another source of influence for Raza.

By the ’60s, a major change was afoot in his practice. “Raza started getting a little anxious about feeling there wasn’t much of India in him,” said poet Ashok Vajpeyi, a longtime friend of the late artist and head of the Raza Foundation. “So, he started on a different direction, and moved toward a kind of abstraction.”

He began looking increasingly to Rajput miniature paintings on paper, dating from the 16th to 19th centuries, moved by “their power, in terms of composition, space, and color,” David said. “Little by little, Raza finished with figuration, and he embarked on the process of deconstruction, toward an explosion of color, until we are left with a colored composition.”

Soon came large, flat areas of vibrating pigment, composed within linearly divided segments of canvas, informed by Mark Rothko as well as other American Abstract Expressionists. He discarded Parisian shades and opted for colors evoking hot, humid Indian summers. His childhood memories of walking alone at night through the forest led to a key series of works from the 1970s, titled “La Terre”(the land), where poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke also comes in as an influence. In these works, glowing points of light break through darkness and chaos.

Around the same time, examined roughly a third of the way through the exhibition, references to Indian spirituality become more prevalent, including early references to bindus as well asnagas, kundalini, Indian poetry, and classical music, known as ragas. As one rounds the exhibition’s last leg, Raza effectively enters his well-known “radical and symbolic geometric abstraction,” per the wall text. His masterworks titled Maa (Mother), Rajasthan, and Saurashtra, to name a few, can include bindus drawn with the perfection of a protractor, alongside dense, roughly gestural geometric forms and color, painted within rectangular strips and square marked segments. The latest works on view are pared down, cleaner, and more uniform, losing much of their vibrancy and singularity. Raza’s symbolic, ordered forms often reference renewal and a cyclical concept of time, and are a support for meditation in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions.

Born into a Muslim family, Raza’s father was a forest ranger who interpreted Islam liberally, leading to his son’s interest in Hinduism and Christianity, all three of which are referenced over the course of his career. “He created an indirect narrative around elements of his own culture and civilization, that was a very important aspect of his work to me,” said artist Manish Pushkale, a mentee of Raza’s who has previously exhibited alongside his teacher.

In the last decade, demand for S.H. Raza’s works has hit record highs, rising 800 percent in value at auction between the mid-1990s and 2010s, reaching a top price of $4.45 million at Christie’s in New York in 2018. “The hardest thing for us is sourcing these incredible works,” said Damian Vesey, a specialist modern and contemporary South Asian art at Christie’s.

At a packed opening at the Pompidou, visitors, many of whom flew in for the event, dressed in a myriad of sparkling saris, lending the event a festive touch, not incompatible with the works on view.

“I think Raza had a celebrative instinct, unlike the usual modernists, where there is disruption, dislocation, tension,” Vajpeyi said. “Raza tried, on the other hand, to reach consonance, tranquility. He was trying a different kind of modernism, which undid the dichotomy between the sensuous and the spiritual. For him, they were more or less the same.”

Describing Raza as a “master colorist,” Vajpeyi added, “Raza’s legacy is that colors can speak. They can sing.”