Raja Ravi Varma’s “Yashoda and Krishna” Sells for $17.9 Million, Setting New Record in Delhi
A late 19th-century painting of a mythic mother and child has just rewritten the price ceiling for Indian art at auction. “Yashoda and Krishna” (ca. 1890s) by Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) sold for $17.9 million at Saffronart in Delhi on April 1, establishing a new auction record for an Indian artist.
The buyer was reported to be Cyrus Poonawalla, the pharmaceutical billionaire and founder of the Serum Institute of India. The result vaults past the previous benchmark: Indian artist M.F. Husain’s (1915–2011) “Untitled (Gram Yatra),” which achieved $13.8 million at Christie’s New York last year and was purchased by collector Kiran Nadar.
The Varma sale also marks a dramatic leap from the artist’s own recent market history. His prior auction record stood at $4.5 million, set in 2023. At $17.9 million, the new figure signals not only heightened appetite for canonical Indian painting, but also the degree to which top-tier material can ignite competition when it appears.
In its lot description, Saffronart positioned Varma as “indisputably remains the most influential pioneer of early modern Indian art,” calling “Yashoda and Krishna” one of his most accomplished works. The auction house’s essay framed the painting as an interpretation of maternal love through the devotional figures of the infant Lord Krishna and his foster mother Yashoda — a subject deeply embedded in Indian cultural memory.
Beyond the headline number, the sale underscores a structural reality of the Indian art market: it is increasingly concentrated at the top. Works by Varma and a small circle of other artists are effectively prevented from leaving India under national heritage laws, a restriction that can keep major examples circulating within a comparatively closed domestic ecosystem.
That legal framework has not cooled demand. If anything, the scarcity of museum-grade works available for open competition appears to intensify it, pushing the most sought-after names into a rarified tier where a single lot can reset expectations. With “Yashoda and Krishna” now the new reference point, the question is less whether Indian art will continue to climb than which artist, and which work, will be able to challenge Varma’s newly established summit.
