“Padma Shri is an honour, but there is a lot more work to be done”

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that if Kiran Nadar wants it, she will have it. In the art auction world, she’s what they call a fighter bidder.

“I am very determined but there are so many works of art that are bought by other people. Some of those losses have hurt,” the founder-chairperson of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) – and the latest entrant in the Padma Shri pantheon – admits.

So, which one stung the most? Sitting inside the KNMA office in Saket, New Delhi, Nadar looks up as though plucking a memory from thin air, and replies, “It’s a bit of a strange story. Years ago, I was bidding for a painting by MF Husain. I really wanted it but it went to someone else. I wanted to know whom I had lost to, but there was no way of finding out,” she says.

Then, in 2020, at the Saffronart’s Spring Live Auction of luxury items and artworks belonging to disgraced diamantaire Nirav Modi, she spotted the very same diptych she had set her heart on – the Battle of Ganga and Jamuna: Mahabharata 12. She purchased it for ₹13.44 crore. Talk about a karmic boomerang.

“Yes, it did feel like that at the time. I’m glad things worked in my favour,” says Nadar, who had flown in hours before from New York to inaugurate the exhibition, ‘Raghu Rai: A Thousand Eyes, Photographs from 1965-2005’.