Collector’s Conscience

KIRAN NADAR IS often hailed as the ‘grande dame’ of the Indian art world, reportedly owning over 13,000 works of art, which include sterling pieces by masters such as Amrita Sher-Gil, Raja Ravi Varma, FN Souza, MF Husain, Tyeb Mehta to name a handful. And yet, she says that when she first began collecting art in the late 1980s it was mainly to embel­lish her home. It wasn’t until about 1990 that the hobby turned into a serious pursuit of the mind and heart. Speaking to Open, the 73-year-old founder of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in Delhi says, “But then the collection grew and for the initial period it was in my own space, and then I was putting artworks all over the office and wherever else I could. After that, it started going to storage. When the collection went beyond what I could display, that’s when I thought of setting up a museum.” And so KNMA—India’s first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art—was born in 2010.

Being the wife of founder and chairman of HCL Technolo­gies’ Shiv Nadar, the third richest man in India (according to Forbes) gives Kiran Nadar ample opportunity to build on her interests to create a national asset. Like other collectors, she de­scribes herself as being driven solely by passion. One of the first paintings she bought for her home was Rameshwar Broota’s black-and-white triptych Runners (1982), which she described as a “reasonably graphic male nude” to Art Basel for ‘Meet the Collectors’. When she first showed it to her husband, he was “horrified” and asked how she could think of putting up such a painting in their home. But when he saw the stark nude male runner in Broota’s studio he put aside his prudery for his wife’s better judgement. Having collected art for more than three decades, Nadar’s friends included the likes of MF Husain who would often visit her home to see some of his own works, and would on a whim decide to repaint the frame cream to white.

Citing Raja Ravi Varma and Amrita Sher-Gil as two of her favourite artists, she says, “The old world of Ravi Varma truly moves me. And the sheer brilliance of a very young Amrita who was taken away at the age of 28 and who has left such great works behind are the two artists I admire the most. Among the Progressives, I love FN Souza for the immediacy in his works, his aggression, for his bold forms, colours and compositions. He has a prolific sense of style.”

What excites her most about buying art? “I don’t know whether excited is the right word,” she says with a smile, “but I am involved with the promotion of art and that’s been my endeavour. I think building the collection and eventually getting a lot of people to come and see it is something that I would like to do and this act of sharing has been an important part of my art journey.” The seasoned collector and philanthropist is at a stage in life where she ponders over “everything” before investing. While her buying decisions are largely in­fluenced by personal taste, they do occasionally get tempered by diktats of the market: “I look at filling gaps in my collection. I look at works that I re­late to. So, there are several criteria.”

As KNMA’s chairperson, Nadar has devoted herself to developing and foster­ing a museum-going culture in a country known more for its ven­eration of cricket and movies. One of the motivations behind starting KNMA, especially in a city like New Delhi, was to fill this cultural void. “You see people going to the theatre or films and they find that interesting. Going to museums and looking at and discovering art is equally challenging. But the museum-going culture doesn’t exist very much in India—least of all in Delhi. Bombay is better, as is Calcutta. I feel art has a crucial and yet, not a very well-understood, role in society. We don’t have a current heritage of art. I mean, we have a rich heritage in the historical sense. We have so many art centres like Hampi, Ajanta-Ellora or Sanchi. We have the traditions of miniature painting, Chola bronzes and Thanjavur painting. I feel we need to rekindle our heritage and keep it going with modern art,” says Nadar, who was recently honoured with the Padma Shri for her con­tribution to the art sector. In 2023, she was also awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour) the highest French civilian award, for furthering Indo-French connections.

KNMA is funded through a philanthropic arm of the Shiv Nadar Foundation and Kiran Nadar acknowledges, “without my husband’s support, it would have been difficult for me to achieve what I have.” Her daughter Roshni Nadar, too, is engaged with the museum’s vision as one of its trustees. But what has been more gratifying for her is that Roshni has become genuinely engrossed in visual arts over the years. “She has started collecting for herself,” says the mother, proudly.

In many ways, KNMA has been a culmination of Nadar’s long-standing dream. Since 2010, it has grown into one of the most influential private institutions championing modern and contemporary art in the country. The museum runs out of two locations, in Saket in New Delhi and Noida in Uttar Pradesh and over the years, it has borne witness to countless popular shows, many of them dedicated to iconic figures such as Nasreen Mohamedi, SH Raza, Anupam Sud, Somnath Hore, Vivan Sundaram, Arpita Singh, Himmat Shah among others.

KNMA’s director and chief curator Roobina Karode finds in Nadar a trailblazer, who shows un­wavering trust in her colleagues and gives them the freedom to flourish. “Kiran is full of energy and is ex­tremely enterprising. I admire that in her. She loves music, she loves to sing, she loves sports, and cinema too. She plays bridge and she’s a cricket connoisseur. So, I see in her a person who has a zest for life and that is a very positive thing to have in your leader, a person whom you look up to,” says Karode, who’s a driving force behind the museum and one responsible for translating Nadar’s vision into reality.

Nadar’s curiosity and open at­titude in transforming the muse­um into an integrated space of human creativity “has been central to what KNMA has become,” adds Karode, who has previously taught modern Western and Indian art history at several Indian universities. “Education was always at the back of our minds. I have been a teacher for 18 years. So, for me, an exhibition besides being visually engaging needed to be a mode of transmitting and generating knowledge. For all of us, at KNMA, it has been an exhilarating journey and also a very diligent, relentless kind where one exploration has led to another in a rather organic way.” Karode is happy that KNMA’s people-friendly curatorial approach has drawn visitors in large numbers and helped redefine a museum’s role in the constantly shifting cultural landscape of a youthful India. She says, “Given the lack of art and cultural spaces in a city like Delhi, it was important to host initiatives that were both educational and entertaining. It is Kiran’s role from an avid art collector to an institutional builder that has expanded her responsibilities and what she envisions to do for Indian art and artists. To have a collection such as KNMA that Kiran has built is a remarkable thing but we also realise that for the museum to reach out and draw in the larger public, it is im­portant how we put that collection out in the public domain.”

Art critic and curator Uma Nair, who is well-versed with Kiran Nadar’s work, remarks, “I watch silently as galleries dance around her, attracted to her like bees to a honey pot. No individual has played a more important role in terms of build­ing the art community and giving artists a sense of security the way she has.” She adds, “I can never forget Tyeb Mehta telling me in 2005, ‘Mumbai has collectors, others are only buyers.’ I can see that Kiran Nadar has proved Tyebji wrong. He must be smiling somewhere in the clouds.”

Those who know Nadar say that she is ambitious and unafraid. Roshini Vadehra, of the Delhi-based Vadehra Art Gallery recounts how in the 2000s Nadar told her father (Arun Vadehra) about her growing collection as it was expand­ing rapidly and he encouraged her to make her collection pub­lic and to open a museum. Vadehra adds, “She is extremely open to possibilities and collaborations, which also makes it easy for ideas to come to fruition.” Nadar is revered by many in the art world as a patron saint who supports artists in multiple ways. “KNMA provides crucial support to the arts through their exhibitions and programming. Many artists wouldn’t be able to find support, exhibition opportunities or acquisition avenues for their ambitious and experimental installations, especially considering the dearth of public institutions in India. As a gallerist, therein lies the biggest difference between her and everyone else—the fact that she is collecting and sup­porting art across the spectrum of mediums, scales, concepts, and generations of artists,” says Vadehra.

While Nadar is, of course, best known for her art collection, interestingly she is also a competitive bridge player. Asked if she sees any similarities between visual arts and bridge, she says, “I think both are mentally stimulating. Bridge is still a very important part of my life.”

Meanwhile, Nadar’s collection is once again expanding and she’s funding a new museum. Scheduled to open in the next three to four years, it is expected to be bigger and more ambi­tious. It will be constructed on an eight-acre plot near the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi. The new museum and cultural centre “will have art, music, theatre and dance. We want to link all the aspects of culture and art. I am excited about it. It’s going to be a major event in our lives,” she says, adding, “I take my responsibilities in the art world very seriously. I am building an institution that is not just for art and artists. It is for education and performing arts and it is for our future citizens and the generations to come. So, everything I am doing now will have an impact for the next 50-60 years till someone else decides to make a change to the museum. Everything that I have been doing is done thoughtfully to have a lasting impact on how Indian and South Asian art is perceived by the rest of the world in the coming decades.”

Amrita Sher-Gilart and cultureKiran NadarKNMA gallerymuseumpaintingsRaja Ravi VarmaWomen Issue 2024