There are a number of reasons for this. Those most responsible for this are gallery-owners themselves, who, with a few exceptions, are more salespersons of artistic artifacts and less conservationists of art. There was always pressure on them to run parallel sales of `pot-boilers' alongside serious art works.

The `pot-boilers' are generally Rajasthani village belles, landscapes of indeterminate geographical location, and of course, epic figures and icons of gods and goddesses. At a little more sophisticated level, the buyers may plunge for a blousy Ravi Varma female. Indeed, Ravi Varma has been a popular draw, especially since a former Prime Minister, a well-known art restorer and a senior artist gottogether to launch this brand of colonial art in a period of reassertive colonial trends.

As a result, this unwieldy balloon did pick up some momentum, but it soon came to grief. One of the reasons is that there are very few good Ravi Varmas around. In fact, there are far more copies, some almost contemporary, in the market today than originals. So the buyer has to be very choosy. Also Varma is the very antithesis of what developed as modern Indian art, being both a colonised mind as well as revivalist.

But seeing two of his oleographs adorning the walls of a friend's bathroom, I realised that the hype has died down and we can put the itinerant raja to sleep without much ado.

Of the revivalist trends, only the work of Abanindranath Tagore, and that too, select examples like the `Death of Shah Jehan', survive the hard light of time. There is a certain limited market of the Delhi-beyond-ridge type that still looks for the effete figures of a style popularised by magazines like `Dharmayug' in the sixties.But this market could also be relegated to the pot-boiler class.

Much better is the market for works evolved out of the inspiration of Chinese art and our own folk art, the latter being the bedrock on which our edifice of contemporary art is built. This is a long unbroken line that would include Gaganendranath Tagore, Jamini Roy, Nandalal Bose, Ram Kinkar Baij, M F Husain, F N Souza, Ganesh Pyne, Arpana Caur, Gogi Saroj Pal, Manu and Madhavi Parekh, Jayashree Burman and Neeraj Goswami, whose rise from a couple of hundred rupees to a good couple of lakhs for a major canvas shows a creditable economic force behind this continuity.

It is the force of the middle class that emerged with the national movement, innovated at every twist and turn, including the industrialisation of the country and the Green Revolution and today gives us our NRIs. What is curious is how despite every effort of Macaulay to turn it into ``brown-Englishmen'' or of the North Americans to integrate it into a standardised burgerculture; this class has managed to change the face of Southall and put the dosa at par with the pizza in New York.

It is they who are the patrons who have put Indian art on the world map. And indeed, Delhi much more than Bombay is their cultural centre. Today we find even newly developed centres like Hyderabad and Bangalore quietly dove-tailing their development to the Delhi pattern.

This primacy gives Delhi art is primordial importance today in the Indian art market. One of the best stocks of Bengal School works, Chitta Prasad, Ram Kinkar Baij and Salim Ali is with Delhi gallery; Ganesh Pyne with the Village Gallery; Sailoz Mookerjea with Dhoomimals; Vadheras for the Bombay and Baroda artists; Ganesha for Delhi's Neeraj Goswami and Paresh Maity, as well as K S Kulkarni, while Kumar Gallery has a large stock of works of the sixties, seventies and eighties. There is enough art to go round but not enough effort to document, to weed out fakes or dealers selling fakes and a suicidal tendency to ``offload''bad works to capture buyers like state institutions. This must stop if our art market is to develop seriously.