Raja Ravi Varma’s “Yashoda and Krishna” Sells for $15 Million, Setting a New Record for a South Asian Painting
A late-19th-century vision of a cow being milked and a baby god clutching a golden cup has just redrawn the top line of South Asia’s auction market. On April 1, Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) set a new record for a South Asian painting when his “Yashoda and Krishna” (1890s) hammered for $15 million at Saffronart in Mumbai.
With fees, the price reached $17.9 million (1,672 million Indian rupees), surpassing the work’s $8.6 million–$12.9 million estimate and breaking a record that had been set only a year earlier. The previous benchmark belonged to Indian modernist MF Husain (1915–2011): his “Gram Yatra” achieved $13.7 million with fees at Christie’s New York in March 2025.
The result places Ravi Varma’s canvas among the most expensive works of art from the region, though it does not take the overall South Asian record. That distinction remains with a 12th-century black stone figure of a bodhisattva from northeastern India, which sold for $24.6 million at Christie’s New York in 2017.
Saffronart said the buyer of “Yashoda and Krishna” was Cyrus Poonawalla, the Indian pharmaceuticals billionaire. In a statement, Poonawalla framed the acquisition as a matter of stewardship: “This national treasure deserves to be made available for public viewing periodically, and it will be my endeavour to facilitate this going forward.”
Poonawalla is the founder of the Serum Institute in Pune, western India, described as the world’s largest vaccine manufacturers. Forbes estimates his net worth at $24.8 billion, ranking him as the ninth-richest person in India. While his collecting has tended to be less publicly visible than that of some other Indian billionaires, the Poonawalla holdings are widely regarded as both substantial and international. In a 2017 interview, his son Adar Poonawalla described the family collection as worth “close to $70m to $80m” and “perhaps the best European art collection in India.” Reported highlights include a £1.3 million Van Gogh landscape, along with multiple works by Renoir, Monet, Dalí, and Chagall.
Painted at the height of Ravi Varma’s career, “Yashoda and Krishna” is an oil on canvas that stages a domestic scene drawn from Hindu mythology: the infant Krishna holds a golden goblet while his foster-mother, Yashoda, milks a cow. The picture is often cited as emblematic of Ravi Varma’s signature synthesis of Western academic realism with Indian mythological subject matter, a fusion that helped shape the visual language of modern Indian painting and earned him the enduring epithet “father of Modern Indian art.”
The sale also dramatically resets the artist’s own market. Until this week, Ravi Varma’s auction record was held by another depiction of Yashoda and Krishna, which sold at Pundole’s in Mumbai in 2023 for $4.5 million.
Beyond price, the transaction lands in a particularly charged legal and cultural context. Ravi Varma is one of 11 artists designated a “national treasure” under a 1972 Indian art and antiquities act, a status that prevents their works from leaving the country. “Yashoda and Krishna” was consigned from a private collection in New Delhi, and its sale underscores how India’s domestic market is increasingly capable of absorbing works that cannot circulate internationally.
For years, the “national treasure” designation has been seen as a double-edged sword: it confers art-historical weight while potentially limiting global demand by restricting export. But as India’s collector base expands, that constraint may be losing its dampening effect. Ashish Anand, chief executive of the New Delhi-, Mumbai-, and New York-based DAG gallery, which has previously exhibited the painting, called the result “a turning point” — arguing that it signals “a maturing collector base—one that is both globally competitive and deeply invested in retaining cultural patrimony within India.”
The broader pattern is hard to miss. Over the past three years, auction records for India’s most valuable historic artists have been falling with increasing frequency, propelled by rapid wealth creation at the top end of the economy. Many of the headline results have centered on mid-20th-century modernists such as Husain, SH Raza (1922–2016), Tyeb Mehta (1925–2009), and Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941), whose work often rethought or challenged inherited artistic traditions.
Ravi Varma’s record is notable precisely because it comes from an earlier moment. Executed in the 19th century and anchored in a traditional mythological subject, “Yashoda and Krishna” suggests that the market’s appetite is widening — not only for modernist critique, but also for the older visual narratives that continue to shape cultural memory. If Poonawalla follows through on periodic public display, the painting’s next chapter may unfold not just in private hands, but in front of audiences who rarely get to see such “national treasures” up close.
