Padma Shri for Kiran Nadar: 40 years, and counting

Kiran Nadar, chairperson of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi, has been honoured with the Padma Shri this year.

She began collecting art in the 1980s, opening a museum in a mall first and seeing it grow into one of India’s biggest private museums. She calls the Padma award an acknowledgement of what she has tried to do in the last 40 years. Excerpts from an interview…

Your tryst with art began in the 1980s. How was the art market at the time? There were no auction houses. Was there enough education on art?

There were no auction houses then and interest in art and art education was limited. While there were universities like Baroda and Santiniketan and many educational institutions that taught art in terms of where to acquire and how to acquire, it was a small community.

There were some galleries and some very good ones that are still there. For me, it was a start. I bought a little bit of art.