‘Why do you fall in love? Why do you worship Vishnu and Shiva?’

Abstract Jagdish Mittal, Vijay Kumar Aggarwal and Om Prakash (O P) Jain's biographies share a major commitment: the creation of art institutions in post-independent India. Labelled as India's ‘interior designers', these collectors have reshaped the visual-material cosmos that had been profoundly altered by colonialism both at home and abroad over the centuries. Formerly colonised and white-dominated communities' collecting practices are notably absent within the existing scholarship. Crucially, their practices are not premised on the appropriation and possession of the ‘other' through imperial conquest - at the centre of a large number of studies that analyse its long-term effects. By contrast, India's ‘interior designers’ are driven by the re-possession of the self, ownership linked to the nation as well as preservation logics. This article argues that in order to decolonise the study of collecting, the epistemes governing such practices also need to be urgently foregrounded.

together with his wife Kamla.'In the city the climate is good for art,' he remarks, referring literally to the absence of humidity.Mittal witnessed events that are widely considered turning points in art historical debates about India (and beyond).A notable example consists of the exhibition of Indian art masterpieces at Government House (later Rashtrapati Bhavan) in New Delhi in 1948 -'the moment of Independence [that] came to be consecrated through art' 7after being on display at the premises of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.Mittal refers to this exhibition, which he viewed in 1949, as a formative experience. 8As a lens into the relation between a sovereignty shift and visual-material cultures whose effects would inform Mittal's future practices, it should be added that viewing this exhibition was certainly no ordinary experience among men from his generation both in India and elsewhere.
During that first evening encounter, Mittal provides me with a number of clues that will shape our upcoming interview: he started collecting at a young age; he never collected from galleries or auctions; he knew royal families who were selling their objects; he would buy objects for very little money and now the value of his acquisitions has raised exponentially; and his collection includes objects from all over India.He also introduces me to his relationship with the late British artist and collector Howard Hodgkinwho cultivated a passion for Indian paintings and drawings 9 and to his painting exchanges with him.Importantly, Mittal told me he never bought non-South Asian/Indian art and objects and claimed that aesthetics has been the driving principle behind his acquisitions.Moreover, he has played a role within wide exhibitionary networks by loaning many objects from his collection to landmark exhibitions such as those organised on the occasion of the 1982 Festival of India in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) exhibition 'India!Art and Culture, 1300-1900' 10 (for the 1985-1986 Festival of India in the USA), and 'Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy' held at the Met in 2015.Together with countless such events, these exhibitions have contributed towards the genre of displaying 'art from India out of India' that I have researched through both ethnography and archival work for almost a decade and a half.At the time of our encounter, Mittal's activities are in full swing: his daily schedule sounds hectic, and he is still buying.That evening he informs me that if there was something 'coming up', he would just drop me there and then and go!The lure of objects, one may say.At the time of my visit, he is also busy organising a conference on textiles that would take place in the coming month of January 2017.Several years later, in October 2021, by good fortune I spot the announcement of an online talk by Mittal, hosted by Dakshina Chitra, a well-known heritage institution in South India. 11I log in to the event and watch him speaking with sharpness about his collection and taking questions from the audience.As I observe the collector and hear his voice, his abiding passion for art shines through the computer screen to re-enter this text thousands of miles away.

India's Interior Designers
These glimpses into Mittal's biography, including his latest digital appearance, are an overture to my inquiry on long-standing themes within the field of collectingwhere research, documentation and theory have overwhelmingly drawn upon materials housed within Western institutions and, with India in view, as the long-term effects of colonial collecting and those (essentially Western) agents behind it.Like Mittal, the other two Indian elderly men, Vijay Kumar Aggarwal and Om Prakash (O P) Jain, whom I analyse in this article, shared a major commitment: the creation of institutions in post-independent Indiaanticipating the trend of art foundations and private museums that has unfolded during recent decades in the country and elsewhere in the global south.I term these figures India's 'interior designers': their interest in art and visual-material cultures often arose independently from art market institutions and well before the idea of India as an 'emergent art market' gained purchase and replaced that of emerging nation.Together with others in the fields of cinema, theatre, dance, the visual arts, craft and architecture, Mittal, Aggarwal and Jain have contributed to reshaping the visualmaterial cosmos that had been profoundly altered by colonialism both at home and abroad over the centuries.Over the past decade, exhibitions on such figures and their archives of photographs and art objects have been curated for public display. 12mpires have been assimilated to 'collections of people, territories and resources; and collections formed, ordered and classified by the imperial powers that acquire them'. 13Cohn has argued that by the time the British departed from India, they had become 'the curators of a vast Museum of Mankind'. 14In this article, I show the importance of reflecting on objects' 'independence'a topic that not only exceeds memory studies but also begs the question of their multiple lives as a result of the passage of hands, the development of 'new eyes' and purposes.This is important to make sense of objects' centrifugal movements out of and across the subcontinent that had already occurred well before 1947 and that would continue also after that, in addition to the division of assets and objects between India and Pakistan. 15hile Rebecca Brown has finely analysed the ways in which works of art and architecture executed from 1947 to 1980 negotiated the need for modern and Indian identities, 16 a great deal of objects included in Mittal's, Aggarwal's and Jain's collections and institutions were created before Independencethus the expression of other eras.In an attempt to re-create worlds, these collectors acquired objects from their own geographically and symbolically dispersed past also by buying them back from outside the subcontinent. 17To consider the effects of objects' independence, I reason along the lines of the combined effects of the relation between materiality and place and thought and placethe pairs that Craig Clunas and Dipesh Chakrabarty have both distilled as the conceptual pivots in their respective works. 18This engagement suggests departing from Western/non-Western dyadic arguments, positing the existence of a radical alterity of taste, aesthetics and collecting practices by Mittal, Aggarwal and Jain in favour of the composite sensibilities and investments through which these collectors picked up the pieces of a shattered British India, reassembled them into both local and translocal exhibitionary complexes, thus inaugurating their entry into new circulation routes and consumption spheres.Their acquisition practices are firmly Rebecca M Brown, Art for a Modern India, 1947-1980, Duke University  Press, Durham and  London, 2009, p 103   In this article, Aggarwal's practices are a case in point.On buying back, see anchored to India, thus contributing to a genealogy of contemporary art market conventions among Indians at home and in the diaspora who have been largely 'buying themselves'. 19They are certainly not the only ones to have done so in time and space. 20What is more, the narratives discussed here point to the collectors in question largely resisting the lure of objects produced outside the subcontinent, such as those found in Indian princely states and in collections of Parsi elite. 21 mobilise these practices to make an intervention on the rich genre of 'ethnographies of collecting' 22 that focuses mainly on the (white) actors involved in colonial expeditions, trade and missionary work who assembled objects whose presence and legacies in museums is perceived as increasingly problematic today.While encounters between collectors, and their transactions and collaborations with relevant communities, are discussed in these ethnographies, formerly colonised and white-dominated communities' own collecting traditions and epistemes largely fall outside their purview.As do those postcolonial museums and institutions whose collections embody other epistemes vis-à-vis visual-material cultures.Critically, the ethnography of collecting offered here is not premised on the acquisition and possession of the 'other' through conquest, 23 but on the re-possession of the self, ownership linked to the nation as well as preservation logics.Thus, with reference to the 'universal engagement between the social and the material', 24 I argue that excentric epistemes governing such practices are notably absent from the debate and these too are urgently needed to decolonise the study of collecting. 25In turn, as Mittal, Aggarwal and Jain are the legitimate owners or keepers of their collections, the much-celebrated collaborative method between anthropologists (and other scholars) and individuals and communities informing the handling of collections whose items once belonged to the latter lose its salience.The inclusion of multiple voices in scholarship on collecting requires the acknowledgement of different power relations, carrying with them other methodological demands on scholars. 26et, recuperating often deteriorated, discarded and dispersed materials from within India or abroadtogether with the creation of new cultural forms, that is the very institutions the individuals analysed here have set upare not gestures by just any citizen.Nor, does acquiring objects automatically translate into an equality of visualmaterial cultures and egalitarian relations.The collectors in question share a similar high-status mercantile background, in particular a Marwari identity.Marwari is a prominent caste of merchant-capitalists, part of India's industrial class that held a strong presence within the domestic economy in the colonial era and beyond. 27The contours of this privileged background call for an analysis of power and difference among individuals and communities in postcolonial contexts, their engagement with visual-material worlds and this engagement's very possibility. 28To understand these figures, attention on the nexus between age, gender, caste identity and art, materiality and ownership is essential.Thus, an intersectional lens is required to address the question of what it means to belong to a particular community in time and space and singling out visual-material objects from available repertoires.Moreover, the diverse nature of objects that have been

Uneven Terrains
'The history of collecting art in India is yet to be written.' 30Pal's statement rings true in many ways: while the narratives offered in this article are by no means exhaustive of the three collectors' visual-material cosmos, at the same time they are a rare occurrence.With the exception of the published work by Jyotindra Jain, an art historian and collector himself who has conceptualised the Sanskriti collections set up by O P Jain and has written about those of Mittal and Aggarwalthereby mediating these figures for the broader publicthere is a conspicuous absence of academic work on art collecting in the post-Independence era.The media, too, has remained largely silent on the above figures.However, collecting is certainly not an unknown practice in the subcontinent: scholarship has been produced on colonial practices under the guise of universal expositions and British and local collectors during the colonial era, among others. 31With Indian art collectors in view from the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth, Pal concludes his analysis by labelling theirs a man's world. 32However, women collectors such as Madhuri Desai 33 and Gira Sarabhai and her famous Calico Museum centring on textiles 34 also appear in Pal's publication among those women who were concerned with 'saving the country's heritage' 35 That the history of art collectingespecially for the post-Independence erais yet to be written for a country like India is striking.Whether a singular history is ever possible or even desirable, its absence and that of comparative analyses also translate into a dearth of theoretical approaches that might have emerged from sustained research.Scholars investigating collecting in the global south have drawn upon scholarship such as that of Walter Benjamin and his trope of the Western collector tied to the processes of modernity. 36Jessica Winegar has termed collecting practices in contemporary Egypt as 'reckonings with different constellations of the modern from those available to Western collectors.They simultaneously included postcolonial, nationoriented ideas of authenticity, progress, and decline; the legacy of socialism; growing public piety; Orientalism; classicism; and avant-gardism.' 37 Winegar brings to the fore these larger projects' criticalitybeyond the collectors' sole production of class distinctionwhich also signal the ways in which practices in such societies might differ from those found in the West. 38Similar arguments can be made for India.Moreover, in a polity highly divided along the lines of caste, class and religion, I have shown that theorising such processes and their enactments by radically different castes and communities requires looking again at how modernity is embodied along social fault-lines beyond national templates. 39esides Benjamin, advances made on Western collecting view this practice, as well as owning, at the core of Western subjectivity, and the acquisition of works of art as the ultimate technique for the accumulation of symbolic capital.In particular, James Clifford has posited collecting in the West as 'a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture,  Routledge, New York,  1994   On a critical approach to collaborations and the study of the artworld, see Manuela Ciotti, 'The Artist Karl Marx and the Auctioned God: "Postpractice" Ethnographies of the Art World, Impossible Collaborations, and and authenticity', while he maintained that 'the idea that identity is a kind of wealth (of objects, knowledge, memories, experience) is surely not universal'. 40As will be shown in the collective narratives offered here, these ideas resonate with personhood in the subcontinent, but in radically different historical contexts.According to Susan Pierce, in Europe three different approaches to collecting are present at the same time in most collectionssouvenir, fetishistic and systematicand these 'embody three possible individual relationships to the object world'. 41For the collectors analysed here, their object world includes almost exclusively objects from India, thus any resulting taxonomy would have to include the affective bind with the site of cultural production.Further, Pierre Bourdieu has argued how, of all the conversion techniques designed to create and accumulate symbolic capital, the purchase of works of art, objectified evidence of 'personal taste', is the one which is closest to the most irreproachable and inimitable form of accumulation, that is, the internalization of distinctive signs and symbols of power in the form of natural 'distinction', personal 'authority' or 'culture '. 42 The acquisition of priceless works of art Bourdieu analysed in the context of twentieth-century France could be compared to acquisitions by classes of Indian collectors during the same period.However, for Mittal, Aggarwal and Jain, the works they acquired need to be viewed in the context of the asymmetrical status of objects which have not been part of Western systems of valuation. 43Notions of pricelessness and monetary value attached to collectables, as most of the narratives that follow will show, signal that such quality largely stems from other human-nonhuman connections, rather than only West-centric authentication systems.There is also the question as to whether a not-so-widespread practice in India, such as collecting, can still be viewed as the ultimate technique for the accumulation of symbolic capital.In this context, this can be acquired more substantially and effectively through other means, for example philanthropy and religious patronage within long-standing 'traditions of giving' in South Asia, 44 as well as ownership of other goods such as land and gold.Moreover, the dynamics powering the production of distinction may shift over time, especially in societies that experienced major sovereignty shifts, while categories of race, caste, gender and religion, among others, shape such production.Finally, collecting in the West has also been described as 'consumption writ large… a perpetual pursuit of inessential luxury goods.It is a continuing quest for self-completion in the marketplace'. 45While there is no dearth of luxury goods within object worlds in India, the narratives analysed here do not point to the relevance of this category.
Yet, distinction, refinement, ownership and possession outlined in studies of Western collecting are fertile lines of inquiry intersecting with broader symbolic and financial investments, which the almost exclusive preference for art from the subcontinent speaks of among the formerly colonised individuals analysed in this article.Without undermining the role of resources and wealth, in the narratives offered here the centrality of the nexus between an object and its role as a reference to a geo-cultural space often takes precedence over the role of price and financial investment. 46My encounters with Mittal, Aggarwal and Jain illuminate both the potential of these theoretical frameworks while also exceeding them in ways that India, as the epicentre of their collections, strongly signals a politics of community, nation, and history, shaping practices around art and material culture also informed by global exhibitionary contexts.And it is to these practices that I now turn.

Interior Designer I: The Eye
Two days after my first encounter with Mittal, I have an appointment for an interview with him at his house/museum.As I arrive, he is already waiting for me, sitting at a desk, impeccably dressed. 47I take a portrait of him holding a recently-published feature article about his persona by Apollo art magazine that highlights invaluable narratives on the collector.A friend of Mittal's arrives at the same time as me to show him some objects he wishes to acquire from a dealer.Unsurprisingly, Mittal's appraisals are highly sought after.He shows him a piece of silver but Mittal remarks that it is too decorative.As a counter-gesture, he shows him an eighteenth-century piece of silver from Aurangabad (western India) he had purchased two months previously for the modest sum of 1,000 Rupees (approx.US$12).At that point, Mittal had bought 100 pieces of silver from all over India.He lovingly holds the piece as I take another picture of him.Then he adds 'since thirty-five years, things come to me.People know what I like, but earlier I would go to several places to get stuff.'The spatial re-centring of his collecting practices that have occurred around his persona over time is intriguing and I wish to know more about his exclusive acquisitions of Indian art.He states, 'funds were very limited.Liking, I like other art, but owning is a different thing.I am not buying in London or in Africa or in other countries, I would have to compete with their collectors in their lands.Christie's' turnover in China is huge, one sale goes for millions', he argues.When I asked him specifically whether he ever bought art while abroad, he replied 'Why buying in London if I can buy better things in India for thirty and forty per cent less!' Mittal clearly belongs to an early generation of buyers for whom 'buying as spectacle'an important trend in contemporary market practices and part of those economies of 'seeing and being seen' at artworld events that are an integral part of consensus formation around art and its 'consecration' 48is not an appealing one.When 'things come to him', we are in the presence of a market turned topsy-turvy, which is more intimate and away from the limelight, following distinct valuation and validation dynamics.
While his buying choices set him aside from many contemporary collectors around the world, I am curious to know whether he perceives himself as different from a collector from outside the West, a Chinese collector for example.He invokes the idea of a universal aesthetics, 'there is no difference, it is only the passion or obsession for art… it is more for aesthetic reasons'.As our conversation progresses, I gently press him on whether there are specific feature(s) in a South Asian collector or something special that drives her or him, or a special relation with a history shaped by colonialism.The premise to his answer calls on his education as shaping his experience: 'I was not trained as a historian but as an artist.I look at art as a piece of art.My approach is totally different because of my training.'But, most interestingly, he inflects aesthetics along national/ territorial/community lines: 'Germans and Chinese etc have different tastes, the Nawabs are Pathan so they would like certain things.Caste affects taste: Sikhs, they would like certain things and even certain subjects.Marathas will like different things as well as people in Banaras.' Speaking about art and materiality along the above lines challenges the very idea of a universal aesthetics.Is there one, I ask?He offers a metaphor to make sense of this complex question: 'Yes, at one level: I don't know music but if you play the wrong note I would know.I love music for music's sake.Bird singing is pure sound, I will enjoy listening.'I am eager to know more about his relationship with his objects, how he views them and whether they index possession or another pursuit.To explain this, he returns to the trope of love: it is his 'love of good art.If someone else has a good painting.I would enjoy anyway.I am not envious of other people's art.I don't want to be possessive; I love but I don't possess.'Aesthetics and monetary value are part of Mittal's range of concerns but not in the ways one is attuned to because of market practices.He never collected a modern painterfor example artists who were active in the 1950s.He contends: 'I wanted to stay focused, and I had limited funds.I was never tempted by [Maqbool Fida (M F)] Husain.He used to come here and paintings were for 300 Rupees but he sold a lot to Pitti [Badrivishal, a late local collector]'.On the other hand, after Mittal moved to Hyderabad he acquired five Basohli paintings for 100 rupees and now he says they are worth 400 million rupees (around US $4.9 million).While we comment on the fact that things are expensive now, he exhorts me to move away from mere monetary considerations by adding 'a good painting also comes at five thousand rupees.It is about aesthetic pleasure.Don't look at prices.'In 1982, he bought a painting for ten rupees and subsequently exhibited it at the Met.Now it could be 500 rupees, he estimates.This painting features in a catalogue entitled Apparatus of Power by New York-based Pakistani contemporary artist Shahzia Sikander.The book lies on his desk.Mittal is interested in her because he likes Islamic calligraphy though he cannot read the script.I ask him how he can tell what is good if he can't read it.'Everything comes down to form', he maintains, and he is able to appreciate that.
In a defiant move, he challenges the logic that often sees an artwork's price as tied to its quality by bringing a painting of no recognised commercial valuebut of aesthetic value, guaranteed by himselfinside the corporate museum.Thinking of these economies and his relations with one of the sancta of the Western artworld, our conversation shifts to his art barters with Hodgkin.These might be limited in number, but they are a very intriguing aspect of this transcultural encounter and interests of two artists and connoisseursone from the former Empire and one from its territoriesover the latter's visual-material culture, also evoking historical asymmetries.Hodgkin visited Mittal in 1966, 1972and 1978. 49 The British artist wanted to know how Mittal acquired his nice pieces.On a date Mittal remembers very well, Hodgkin gave him a painting representing an owl in exchange for an ordinary Odissi painting.As he shows me the owl painting in a catalogue, Mittal says of Hodgkin: 'he is an impulsive collector.The owl is worth 4 million Rupees (around US$48,500).This was in November 1984!' Rehearsing the question that possibly Hodgkin had in According to Stoler, they did not dwell on their own positionality and the role of race and postcolonial identities.See Ann Laura mind during his visits to him in India, I ask how Mittal developed the (aesthetic) eye. 50'Everybody has the faculty of the eye.You need to discuss things: I discussed them with my teacher, Nandalal Bose,' he argues.Interestingly, the ocular here appears to be devoid of the divine frame that defines darsána (sight of the god) in the context of Hindu deity worship.I kindly request him to explain how he developed his taste: he again mobilises his preferred figure of speech, the metaphor: 'If you taste the good sweet once then you know what a good sweet is.When I came to Hyderabad, there was only one sweet shop, so we had to buy what was available.Now there are more shops.'Thus, 'if bad art is shown to people, they would go for it because there is nothing else'.As the time for leaving him approaches, he shows me images of the textiles he is busy choosing for his upcoming conference presentation, and a sari, which he gently holds in his hands and looks over its pattern in admiration.This moment is captured by a final photograph into which I place myself in order to have a record of a special moment.Bourdieu has predicated the very existence of the work of art on the cultivation of the eyeitself the outcome of a biographical processwhen he argues 'Given that the work of art does not exist as such, meaning as an object symbolically endowed with meaning and value, unless it is apprehended by spectators possessing the aesthetic disposition and competence which it tacitly requires, one could say that it is the eye of the aesthete which constitutes the work of art but only if one immediately remembers that it can only do so to the extent that it is itself the product of a long collective history, that is, of the progressive invention of the "connoisseur", and of a long individual history, that is, of prolonged exposure to the work of art.' Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Susan Emanuel, trans, Stanford University love.'He would sell other assets first. 56As in the case of Mittal, love is a feature in collecting narratives, this time accompanied by the idiom of kinship at the premiere art market forum in the country that also hosts non-commercial booths like his.As in my first encounter with Mittal, he glances over some important details of his life as a collector: he spent time in the UK, he has bought art from several sources and to my question about why he collected only art from South Asia, he replies, 'Actually I started collecting art from other parts of the world but there is so much in India that I stopped.'Less than a month later, Vijay receives me at his home in an up-market location in South Delhi. 57The walls of his living room are adorned with many paintings by famous artists (I can spot Ravi Varma, MF Husain, and George Keyt among others) and a great deal of sculptures and objects equally grace the place.I start the interview by recalling our conversation at the time of the Janah exhibition.Back then, I was struck by the explanation behind the name of his institution 'Swaraj' (home rule). 58Swaraj is the name of Aggarwal's late mother.I wonder about the contours of his choice and how that has shaped his collecting practices.But I will have to wait until my next appointment with him to hear about the issue of naming during the nationalist struggle for independence.Instead, Aggarwal wants to share other details about his biography:

Interior Designer II: The Preserver
As a result of studying engineering in America, marrying a British woman and working with a multinational trading company in Switzerland, I came back to India to start my own business.This gave me the chance to travel around the world, from South America to Japan, etc.I visited all the museums everywhere I went and all of my visitors were interested in India.With one of them, I went to Ajanta and Ellora in 1978-79.At the 1964 World's Fair in New York, the French had sent the Mona Lisa, which was housed at the Met, while the Italians had sent [Michelangelo's Vatican] Pietà, I was so lucky to see those there!Going to Khajuraho and Orissa, the curiosity for Indian art was always in the mind.In those days, it would take longer to travel (you go on one day and have to come back the day after) and so, in the spare time we went to museums and antique shops.
As in the case of Mittal, Aggarwal also visited the above-mentioned 1948 exhibition at Government House in New Delhi and the Festivals of India among others.His future as collector was shaped by his earlier experiences in life, in particular his childhood in Mussoorie. 59There, he was surrounded by British paintings, cutlery and furniture found in the two British hotels in Mussoorie and Dehradun that his grandfather acquired in 1939.He recalls: I stayed in Mussoorie until 1960, then I went to America.Mussoorie had a lot of British antiquities (silver etc) so I was exposed to that, but I didn't have the money to buy them.My father went to Kolkata for business in 1950 but I couldn't follow him because of school.My father wasn't a collector, he bought some Bengal School and miniatures for decorating the house… In 1966, I came back from New York and stayed in India to do business.I travelled around the world from 1976 because of the trading company.The really interesting thing starts with traveling abroad and in India for both work and holiday.
When he begins to travel and visit antique shops, all the memories from the past [his experience at the hotels] come back to him and he starts to buy.He begins by collecting 'British-Indian' [art from the British period in India] because dates and reference books were available.This phase lasted for between three and four years.While studying his collection, I noticed that it includes art from Africa, France and Japan, among others.While at the IAF, he had told me that he began collecting art from other parts of the world but then he stopped.I am interested to know if that decision coincided with him residing in India or if this had happened while he was abroad.Aggarwal explains: When I wanted to expand on British-Indian art and went to a bigger dealer, they also had the Bengal School and curiosity led me to try some other genres from India.I very seldom bought British-British or Italian or American.India was the centre.The British had done a good job in documenting the place.Despite being married to a British woman, having British children, living in America, and my best friends being from America and Europe, my focus in art remained India.I might get the odd painting here and there because if you buy a lot you might want to buy the other two.
His cosmopolitan biography is the contact zone where the affective bind between identity, geographies and visual-material cultures unfolds.Despite their different life experiences, both Mittal and Aggarwal converge towards the same symbolic centre, that is Indiaand this is the case also for O P Jain, as I show in the next section.As Aggarwal's persona as Indian collector begins to take shape in our conversation, I wish to know whether he perceives himself as different from a US collector or a Chinese one, for example.He answers as follows: 'Let me stay in India.I started to buy the Bengal School from a dealer. 60In the Marwari house, the wife would buy five paintings.The men did not think that putting money in art was worthwhile.' Aggarwal's attitude towards art departs from earlier practices within the Marwari community.Gender differences are also striking: from women's small purchases to his large investments.He then refers to people who started to buy art early in life.'I came later and only when I had an income with the companyafter providing for everything, my surplus money went into art.I only bought art.'However, he does not see himself like a US or Chinese collector and I ask why.
Initially, I would say yes.Like US collectors in the 40s and 50s, when you see Ajanta and Ellora you don't see Picasso, in your mind you are still with the real figures.The Chinese and the Japanese remained with the pure Japanese and Korean art: it was only in France, America and the UK that modernism came.Because of gallery advice, people would buy certain things.I don't think people went on their own, they went to champagne cocktail events, but I don't know if many people bought things just because they loved the art.They went by the consultant and the dealer.Most early collectors in India bought art just because they liked it and it was mythological, they saw India in it. 61'Seeing India' versus the advent of modernism is a fascinating argument.Interestingly, the African philosopher Achille Mbembe makes a parallel My emphasis one on the relation between form and the West and their 'reconciliation' through black art when he argues: since Duchamp, the act of giving form, of animation, has moved to the background.When the West 'discovered' l'art nègre (Negro art) at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was above all else fascinated by what it had forgottenthat image and form did not need to be separated.In fact they could be reconciled in the object, and their reconciliation in the object is what endowed them both with a singular animating power.Thus, the vitalist construction of African objects at the beginning of the twentieth century. 62der Picasso's opaque shadow, both Aggarwal and Mbembe raise important questions around the emergence of hegemonic modes of figuration, drawing upon 'the other's' form to produce them. 63n his relentless pursuit of art from India, as mentioned earlier, he resorts to dealers.Recalling the photography albums he purchased from Portobello in London, I ask him whether he would personally go in search of these albums.He narrates: Apart from what I got from the hotels and from my father, I bought from the shops around the house.Unfortunately, I travelled so much I never got to know the artists.Compare with Abhishek Poddar, 64 he was staying here, he was not moving around.In my case, I only got to know the art and the dealer.Today when you buy art from a dealer, you don't have 100% proof of provenance.If you are a friend of the artist, that gives you an edge on provenance.
'From the 1980s, I was well known to the shops.'His dealer buys online from Portobello and then he proposes things to him, 'and they know what I like', he argues.Earlier he would go in search of things, while now things come to himas in Mittal's case.
I resume the conversation with Vijay a few weeks later.We have an appointment at an exhibition opening at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) in Delhi and then I am again warmly welcomed in his home. 65This is the time to go back to his museum in Noida named after his mother, Swaraj, and his institution's designation as 'archive'.Why choose 'archive' and not 'museum', like other collectors have done, I ask.'When I named [the institution] Swaraj, it was my mom, and in the 20s and 30s children were named Swaraj, Swatantra etc.These names mean self-rule and independence.'Unlike Mittal's approach to his collectables, Vijay's choice of archive signals ownership: 'it is because it is my personal collection and personal wealth.Once you make a museum and you donate the whole thing and you don't own it, you are a custodian.'He is not very enthusiastic about the idea of the museum in India.He argues 'In India, the concept of museum is totally wasted, the aim is to preserve.My whole idea is to preserve.When I go around and see a painting which is in a bad condition, I want to bring it back to its former glory.My biggest contribution is to put everything under one roof and preserve what I have and restore it.In thirty years, I have done between 400 and 500 paintings.'Upon mentioning this staggering number, he shows me a painting lying in his apartment which has just been brought back from the restorer. 66He is still collecting, though in small ways.I ask him whether we have reached a point of general scarcity of the art genres he has in his collection.He replies 'There is a scarcity and it is beyond my reach.Works are around.'Vijay mentions the 1992 Sotheby's auction at the ITC Hotel in Delhi where he recalls 'everybody was there'. 67Auctions fostered the market for art and helped form a pool of collectors in India, in the UK and in the US. 68At the 1992 auction, Vijay recalls that more people knew about Husain than Ravi Varma and he bought works there.
At the very end of our second interview, he hands me over a brochure on the educational institutions initiated by his grandfather and subsequently expanded and supported by his father and now by him and his brother. 69Established in 1946, on the eve of India's Independence, the Seth Jai Parkash Mukand Lal Institutions of Knowledge & Service currently comprises twenty-eight institutions, including educational institutions attended by thousands of students, and hospitals in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.The brochure features pictures of Aggarwal's male family members, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and other prominent politiciansthe familiar portraits of the elites in those times.Not only is Aggarwal's revelation of the extensive and highly gendered philanthropic activities across three generations impressive but it also comes at the end of two long conversations.The revelation speaks of heroic times marked by both epochal changes and Partition's brutal violence.In the West, collecting and philanthropy constitute a well-known nexus, testifying to practices of assembling and recirculating wealth and gaining self-worth in the process.Here, the Aggarwal family firm, with 'porous boundaries between kinship as a symbolic logic and commerce as a material one', 70 is part of South Asian trends of anti-colonial nationalism that gave further impetus to the 'conceptual and practical transformations of indigenous charity into service (seva) for the moral, cultural, and economic upliftment of the soon-to-become independent nationssuch ideas also fuelled by the Gandhian emphasis on sarvodaya (welfare for all).' 71 Indeed, the founder of what would turn into the above-mentioned network of institutions, Seth Mukand Lal (Aggarwal's grandfather), became a staunch Gandhian (and held a close relation to the Mahatma), 72 and service was a central practice not only for him but also for his successors. 73is biography, and that of his son Seth Jai Parkash, 74 is narrated along the lines of the absence of a binary between profit and piety shaped by Gandhian values. 75Vijay Aggarwal also had a strong connection with Mother Theresa and contributed to her initiatives. 76As a novel and wide-ranging chapter of the collector's life literally opens up before my eyes, artworks as kin, his cosmopolitan biography and the Swaraj Archive acquire an altogether different meaning.The entanglement of histories of capitalism, male gender, his family's participation in the nationalist movement for Independence, philanthropic activities and the focus on India as the centre of collecting activities come together in a bundle of ideologies and practices that gradually eclipse my initial question on collecting as symbolic capital.The question as to whether his family's philanthropic activities or art collecting He gives the restorer about eight to ten major and eight to ten minor paintings a year.A different restorer regularly visits the collection at the climatecontrolled archive to deacidify the paintings' paper.
To have the possibility of in-house restoration at Swaraj, he imported the equipment from Poland but cannot find people working full time.
The 1992 event was preceded by a charity sale of contemporary art organised by Sotheby's in 1989 that showed that the rich classes in Mumbai 'liked to be seen buying art.Prices went through the roof and all the paintings sold.'This led Sotheby's to start operations in the country, hoping to capitalise on India's imminent economic boom.See Geraldine Norman, ART MARKET / Delhi delights: Is India on the brink of an economic miracle?Sotheby's thinks soit's holding its first auctions there in October, Independent, 25 July 1992, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ art-market-delhi-delightsis-india-on-the-brink-ofan-economic-miraclesotheby-s-thinks-so-it-sholding-its-first-auctionsthere-in-october-1535744.Inspired by principles of non-possession and nonviolence, Gandhi was successful in convincing capitalists of the time that 'the "sin" of wealth accumulation in the hands of a few could be "nonviolently" mitigated by persuading the capitalist that he held his riches in have accrued him more symbolic capital in India is increasingly a moot one, given the vast number of people who have benefited from the educational and other activities made possible by the former.

Interior Designer III: Heritage Man
The Swaraj Art Archive entrance features lamps and other objects that Aggarwal has purchased from O P Jainthe final figure I discuss in this article.Prior to meeting Jain, my memories of him are linked to the many artworld events I attended in Delhi, with his slender figure's swift and silent appearances and equally non-sensational flight out of the premises.In February 2016, I finally meet the founder of the Sanskriti Pratishthan, a public charitable trust founded in 1978, and multi-museum complex in the outskirts of Delhi.A giant banyan tree welcomes visitors at this institution's main gate.Later, Jain tells me that it was planted when they bought the land and he attributes its superb growth to the irrigation they have been providing to it.Sanskriti is a heritage project where the immersive built environment tinted in a soothing ochre paint is also rich in flora and fauna.Off a busy road and the large metropolis, Sanskriti is an oasis of tranquillity buzzing with art workshops, talks and visitors, where vegetarian food is served.Those familiar with the very diverse built environments in north India, such as villages, the Crafts Museum (set up in Delhi in 1956) 77 or the Neemrana hotels (which O P Jain set up together with Anant Nath) will recognise recursive templates of style, colours and form, which, together with other architectural traditions, converge into a national visual-material culture extending to both public and private spaces. 78ain was born in 1929.He tells me that his life spans over three centuries as he has learnt a great deal about the nineteenth century from his family (for example about 1857), he lived the twentieth century and is now in the twenty-first.He hails from a family with many siblings, was not educated and did not go to college.The turning point in his life was an encounter with Mulk Raj Anand, 79 who pointed him in the direction of art.Jain had gone to him to sell paper; Mulk Raj Anand told him that he could not perform dukandarı̄(shop-keeping) for the rest of his life.Anandagram (the name of the location where Sanskriti is situated) is a tribute to him.Moreover, Jain is known for having been the convenor of the Delhi chapter of INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Heritage) for fifteen years.With heritage as a prominent concern, he fought a number of Public Interest Litigations (PILs).More than anything else, he sees himself as a catalyst: the three museums on the Sanskriti premises are born out of his collecting activities and uphold an important vision.
The Museums of Everyday Art, Indian Terracotta and Textiles are a conduit for the preservation and presentation of indigenous heritage, craftsmanship, aesthetic functionality and cultural practices.Tradition and modernity are not two separate categoriesone transmutes into another.The preservation of cultural heritage, therefore, has its own validity.The museums at Sanskriti are a base for such preservation as great attention has been given to the socio-cultural context of the objects. 80anskriti privileges the quotidian, the popular, the indigenous: 81 most items in the collections do not feature individual artists' names.Rather, it is craft communities who are the protagonists here and their organic connection with their geographical location in India.The materiality of this connection is celebrated too: alongside artefacts in the Museum of Indian Terracotta Art, one can also view different types of miṭ ṭ ı̄(soil) from various parts of the country.
However, this is not a natural history museum: mitti here embodies different cultural substances.The collections at Sanskriti are classified and discussed in a series of publications by Jyotindra Jain, who also regularly teaches there.Sanskriti is also linked to the history of contemporary art in India.It granted awards to a number of artists who are widely recognised today.Sanskriti has embraced the digital world and it can be found on Google Arts & Culture. 82espite his frailty, on the day of our encounter Jain takes me for a tour of the three museums.I observe his meticulousness as he cleans his shoes from dust on the mat placed at the entrance of each museum building.When inside the Museum of Indian Textiles, 83 he asks a young attendant to leave the cases of textiles open in a particular way so that people understand that they can go through them.The museum features a rich collection of 450 pieces, though he remarks that it is not as textile-rich as the Calico Museum.At the end of the tour, he instructs an attendant to let me into his havelı̄(mansion) on the Sanskriti premises to look at his ceramics collection.Once inside the house, it is a pleasant déjà vu but also much more.A very elegant space, with paintings from different eras as well as symbols that speak to its founder's identitythat is, statues of Mahavıra, the twenty-fourth and last tırthaṃ kara or propagator of the Jain faith, embodying emptiness and absence, a relief of whom also graces a courtyard wall.
The haveli contains art genres that are not housed anywhere else at Sanskriti, conveying the presence of other sensibilities.Though there are Jain textiles in the museum, the haveli is a lens into Jain's personality, a more intimate space where the symbols of his faith are on display, together with other art and material culture genres and styles.The question of distinction, refinement and possession through collecting and the establishment of a public trust needs to be linked to the wider symbolic and financial investments with the (Jain) self and cosmology.The haveli and Sanskriti point to the much-writtenabout topic of the coexistence of renunciation, a characteristic of the Jain faith, and wealth accumulation and traditions of giving within this successful merchant community. 84As well as the usual philanthropic activities within the Jain community that are most visible in temple patronage, Jain's practices concern other visual-material cultures.Some of the questions around these important connections remain unanswered, however.Over time, an invitation and appointments for a further interview with Jain had to be dissolved as a result of health issues and other circumstances.As we read artists through their material creations, in the same fashion I take the haveli and Sanskriti as statements of Jain's 'visual-material cosmos' to which he devoted almost a life-time.vol 9, no 3, 1984, pp 20-33; Paul Dundas, The Jains  [1992], Routledge, London and New York, 2002; James Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995

Conclusions: Collecting as Visual-Material Swaraj
The interior designers' relations with their collections are intertwined with their personal biographies and speak of intersecting pursuits.For Mittal, it is the cultivation of the eye at the service of his aesthetic world; for Aggarwal, it is the imperative of restoring and preserving artworks; and for Jain, it is heritage enshrined in the culture that gives the name to the museum complex and encompassing mitti worlds.These collections are representations of India through forms of cultural production that are widely cherished.While the three figures' ex-centric epistemes indeed converge around a centre that is India, at the same time their biographies show how they are embedded in exhibitionary networks that are powered by Euro-American institutions.Like the artists working in the period between 1947 and 1980 who carved out a positionality that eschewed both simplified versions of indigenism and universalismwhile at the same time striving for their identities to appear both modern and Indian 85the cosmos of the interior designers are neither nativist accomplishments nor do they solely project their stakes into the global arena.Rather, they present 'India in its own terms', to borrow art and dance historian Kapila Vatsyayan's words on the 1982 Festival of India in London, which she helped conceptualise. 86As scholars have noted, these terms are the outcome of transcultural encounters, and their meanings in exhibitionary contexts are contingent on foreign and domestic politics. 87Yet, drawing upon the ensemble made of nationalist struggles, philanthropic activities, vernacular capitalism, gods and goddesses, aesthetics, temples, kinship practices and village cultures, these cosmos stand for an epistemic home rule ante litteram: they speak back to hegemonic practices of acquiring art, and put forward claims that contemporary trends for decolonising knowledge seek to foreground today.The nation's interior designers are important precursors of such trends in the realm of art and material culture while their elite agency frames them.At the same time, their collections are fragile formations, they might vanish, be dismembered, or might fail to find a proper space after all.They might be sold on or continue to exist only in a digital form.Ultimately, the collections assembled by Mittal, Aggarwal and Jain wait in trepidation for their next symbolic and physical place and space in the world.I am extremely privileged to have met Jagdish Mittal, Vijay Kumar Aggarwal and Om Prakash (O P) Jain, and I am grateful to them for their time and for sharing their thoughts with me.I also wish to thank those who work at their institutions for their help with my research.Conversations with Jyotindra Jain, Annapurna Garimella, Pramod Kumar KG and Priya Pall were extremely helpful in situating the collectors I discuss in this article as well as the broader contexts of their practices.Research for this article was carried out with a Novo Nordisk Art History Grant entitled 'Postcolonial Material Words: The History of Private Collecting of Indian Art since 1947'.I thank this funding body for this precious opportunity.I presented earlier versions of this article at the panel 'Exhibiting Asian Modernities' at the Asian Dynamics Conference at the University of Copenhagen in 2017thanks to Oscar Salemink, Jens Sejrup and Nora Taylor for organising this and discussing my paper respectivelyand at the workshop 'Re-creating Certitude: The Aesthetics of History in Art and Photography Collections in a Transoceanic Perspective' which Brown, Art for a Modern India, 1947-1980, 2009,  op cit   Kapila Vatsyayan, 'India  Presented in Its Own  Terms', Museum, vol  XXXIV, no 4, 1982, pp  204-213   Rebecca Brown, Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2017 I organised in 2018 at Aarhus University (AU), which also funded the event.I am grateful to the audiences at the above events for their invaluable comments and to Marco Musillo, who kindly read a previous version of this article and provided illuminating comments.Moreover, I wish to thank Jannet King, Third Text's Copy-Editor and proofreader for this issue, and Samiksha Bajpai for their invaluable help with this article's style and languages.In the ethnography, a few details have been modified to preserve anonymity.
In a similar way to how the initial acquaintance with Mittal occurred, brief encounters with Vijay Aggarwal precede an extended interview Swaraj Art Archive, photo: 'One man's lifelong devotion to Indian art', 2016, op cit, also mentions Mittal and Hodgkin visiting a Matisse exhibition together in London in the 1960s.
The giant banyan tree at the main gates of the Sanskriti Pratishthan, photo: the author The grounds of the Sanskriti Pratishthan, photo: the author