Neville Tuli's back, and he wants to teach us about India's heritage

Back in 2006, at a modern and contemporary Indian art sale by Sotheby's auction house in London, a bidding war over a work by Francis Newton Souza drove up the Goan modernist's work to over 600,000 pounds ($1.1 million).

- Dhamini Ratnam

MUMBAI:

The underbidder who lost out was Neville Tuli, whose paddle became a topic of conversation in subsequent news articles. An auctioneer himself, he went on to bring home five miniatures, a work by a mid-19th-century Belgian painter, as well as a Ram Kumar and an untitled Akbar Padamsee. His morning's expenditure was a handsome 663,000 pounds ($1.25 million), The Art Newspaper reported.

Tuli, now in his 60s, has been a contentious figure in the Indian art scene ever since he set up The Tuli Foundation for Holistic Education & Art (HEART) in 1995. In 2000, he started Osian's Connoisseurs of Art Private Limited (OCA) in Mumbai. His aim, he once told a journalist, was to create "the greatest arts and culture institution in the world". He authored a book on Contemporary Indian art, held large exhibitions of not only art but also film memorabilia, with society's who's who in attendance, and conducted auctions. He also collected widely, from Hollywood memorabilia to Japanese Samurai masks and modern Indian artists as well as contemporary Indian art.