In fact, it took considerable time for this to happen. It did not happen as long as art was only another form of autograph hunting. Gaganendranath began to inch ahead of Rabindranath only when our contemporary art began to get its proper recognition. And with its international prices rising, Gaganendranath, the father of anti-colonial Indian art, was bound to gain in relation to his equally anti-colonial relative, who, in fact, handed his knighthood back to the British after Jallianwala Bagh, because where the poet's was a political reaction, the artist had created a visual anti-colonial expression.

It is his expression that has survived, with ups and downs, twists and turns, to the present. Abanindranath comessecond because while he, too, sought out an art to suit the nationalist agenda, where Gaganendranath challenged elite aesthetics and proposed radical changes on the continent, Abanindranath tried to revive a dead past that could not come alive again. So, despite being a pioneer and as good an artist as Gaganendranath, he is behind him in terms of price.

Rabindranath follows them as his foray into art was not a very long one, nor was his concern with it a single-minded journey. The poet was only making a critique of revivalism and showing how to break away from the fetters of the past. As such, his contribution was a partial one and the price put on it by society varies accordingly.

Indeed, when we look at the fourth name, Ganesh Pyne, we realise that while the price mechanism does reflect a trend of reacting to the world, it is how artistically that reaction is put forward and how original the effort of the artist is that count. Pyne's work synthesises not only the narrative tradition of the Kalighatdrawings, the first popular expression of the anti-colonial Indian middle-class, but also the finesse of Bengal School expression, reflecting the theatricality of the resistance of the class to colonialism while defending a capitalist evolution of society, of which colonialism was part and parcel.

Pyne, however, scores largely because despite this artistic compromise, or probably because of it, he's able to make the art of our national movement palatable beyond those subscribing to its ethos directly, just as the `magical realism' of Marquez scores above the stark realism of Steinbeck of another era. Pyne, too, can be savagely radical as in his study of a vampire-like the young man in a white cap pictured in the catalogue of the Glenbarra Museum Collection shows. But stylistically, the biting satire has a certain aesthetic smoothness to it. But without this sting, the artist would have been little more than a dangerous-looking butterfly.

The commitment to the anti-colonial movement, to the folk expressionof the peasantry and tribals who made up its backbone, with a disdain for the feudal class that had failed to give the leadership to ring out the colonial power and bring in an alternative and a vacillating and ambivalent approach to the new is reflected most sharply in the top 10. At least nine of the 10 artists in the list can be said to be within the broad framework of the art of the national movement.

At least six or seven of them express their nationalism firmly in their art. But as we come along the time-scale to living artists, we see that while the commitment to this major trend in our contemporary art is still there, and the radicals have increased from three or four in the first list to six in the second and seven in the third.

One must conclude, therefore, that our public taste in art reflects a preference for those who break with forms within the framework of a powerful democratic tradition that the NRI, facing second-class status in the West today, challenges elitist imperial prejudices with.This is similar to what the tribal and the downtrodden peasantry resisted in colonial society.

But the language of this middle-class resistance is circumspect and tongue-in-cheek. But wherever an artist can go beyond the acceptable, like Vivan Sundaram, Arpana Caur, Arpita Singh, Krishen Khanna, Manu Parekh or Tyeb Mehta, art lovers do not disappoint them. Ultimately, our taste in art is what our taste in life is. It includes a powerful will to express ourselves independently; to use the visual language of the masses fighting for this independence, clothed in the artist's own independence from conventionality; and to harmonise the changes taking place in visual expression with the continuity of the tradition outlined above.

This makes all three of our lists understandable. And what is more interesting is to read-the horizontal relations that emerge by reading Gaganendranth, Pyne and Ram Kumar together; or Abanindranath, M F Husain and Krishen Khanna, or Rabindranath, Anjolie Ela Menon and Vivan Sundaram;or Ganesh Pyne, F N Souza and Arpana Caur. The interesting relational picture that emerges convinces us of the internal consistency that lies behind the market and the emergence of tastes. Our lists are merely reflections of these realities.