This first became evident at Christie's auction on October 5 this year. There were nine lots of Kalighat paintings and seven overshot the highest expected price, £1,500 (approximately Rs 1.05 lakh), the highest being Rs 2.52 lakh for a portrait of Kartikeya and another of Shiva. The total amount netted was Rs 17.03 lakh for all the lots put together. And the average price per work was Rs 1.3 lakh.

In fact, in a forthcoming auction in India, works of folk art from Ratnagiri are priced between Rs 45,000 and Rs 75,000. A Warangal scroll is priced at Rs 4 lakh. Three Bastar tigers between Rs 30,000 and Rs 40,000 and a Bastar horse between Rs 25,000 and Rs 35,000. These prices are exorbitant by any standards, especially when one considers that most of these works would have changed hands for not more than a couple of hundred rupees. Also, the stress seems to be on antiquity and not originality.

It is evident that most of this profit accrues to the salesman and galleries while the craftsmen get a pittance. Also to be reasonable, it would appear that a narrow stratum of vested interests is trying to fleece ignorant collectors. In fact, a forthcoming auction was forced to withdraw a doubtful work of Rabindranath Tagore, while at least two works of Bratindranath Tagore have been attributed to Abanindranath (one of them on the cover of the catalogue) and priced as such. Obviously, the unwary collector will pay a much higher price that he or she had ever bargained for. But my guess is that corporate buyers eyeing charity-for-tax-relief angle more than that of art as investment would try to underpin the effort. This is neither likely to help the non-corporate collector nor the art market, for the buying of corporates can only be described as whimsical at best.

Today, both the buyer and the purchaser need protection. A number of foreign artists are coming to India and are using the imagery of Indian artists with impunity. Francesco Clemente had earlier produced works that were very similar to those of Kuldeep Singh Jus while a New York buyer of Arpana Caur has sent a photograph of a work of his with her well-known scissors motif.

Not being a great believer in so called ``intellectual property rights'' in principle, I feel that foreign artists using the motifs of Indian ones should admit their intellectual debt to them, as many of our artists do in the case of Piccaso or Matisse; but an admission of that would mean accepting that Indians are as modern as anyone else in the world.

For the moment, it would seem that proper protection of the designer rights of our craftsmen is the only immediate solution.

And a forthcoming workshop at the India International Centre on November 24 should be quite helpful in that direction. The backgrounder circulated by the organisation points out how ``in the face of liberalisation and the coming of foreign apparel companies, if our traditional and tribal artisans and weavers are not well-versed with their legal rights, there is a threat that they may even be divested of their cultural heritage by illegal copyrights being created by other persons.''

But the seminar should also discuss how a system of state legal aid should be evolved to automatically help such litigation by craftspersons and not create yet another class of people, individual, lawyers, to feed off the already exploited craftspersons. Such litigation conducted on the market principle may even deprive the craftspersons more than they are already.

Also, the claim that ``the attempt is to encourage contemporary use of our traditional art and crafts so as to increase their market on one hand and providing them with their rightful recognition and remuneration on the other'' is a laudable objective but the implementing machinery must be made foolproof.

I wholly agree with the aim of acknowledging ``the individual traditional and tribal artisans and weavers for their work rather than treating him/her as merely an imitator of a given cultural heritage,'' but the distinction between creativity and revivalist activity in the arts must be maintained, because originality should be the basis of intellectual property rights and mere production. This approach has allowed India to successfully develop an effective productive base for cheap medicines, which a product patent approach can well destroy. So a balance needs to be struck between the needs of an immediate solution to a threat and the long term need for Indian industry to resist product patents tooth and nail.