While the lure of Pyne holds firm, the sale of four weak works at a steady £1,300 each (Rs 87,022) intrigues me. Were the works bought in? It is evident from the sales figures that the auction house had, in fact, overpriced Pyne a little, if one takes the quality of the works into account.

The works of Husain that sold, however, showed the auction house to be very accurate indeed. The average price expected worked out to £1.87 per sq cm (Rs 125.18), while the actual price bid was £1.77 per sq cm (Rs 118.48), reflecting the auction house's correct estimate of Husain's work. This is, of course, possible as Husain is an artist whose works are well-documented, authenticated and about which there is very little confusion. So a market projection of his work is bound to be better than that for lesser known or less documented artists. From this angle, both Husain and Pyne are a safe buy, provided the works are properly vetted to see they are not fakes.

Another artist whose record was predictable was Abdur Rehman Chugtai, with his work on the cover of the catalogue going for £28,000 (Rs 18,74,320). His works overshot the higher average £7.06 (Rs 472.60) per sq cm to fetch something close on £10 per sq cm (Rs 669.40). In fact, his excellent sketches, which were expected to fetch £5,000 at best (some Rs 3,34,700), actually fetched £9,000 (Rs 6,02,460), working out to £473.60 per sketch, which is roughly Rs 31,708.14.

This price for prints is very heartening indeed, for prints are a medium that allows good art to get to a far wider group of people than a single canvas or drawing would and is, therefore, very much in keeping with the objective of making good art as easily accessible as possible to the widest possible audience. And the fact that these prints sold at almost twice the expected high reflects how the importance of prints is being slowly recognised as the art of our times. When we look at the bidding in general, we can see that some works of excellence like Anjolie Ela Menon's Magician or Akbar Padamsee's self-portrait failed to sell, as did the religious kitsch that is so popular with the drawing-room set nowadays. Collectors are emerging today from the drawing room buyers of yesterday, it would seem. People are buying more carefully. And Jamini Roy came a cropper, with only two out of five works selling at £900 (Rs 60,246) for a work expected to fetch £1,500 (Rs 1,00,410), and another fetching £1,200 (Rs80,328), instead of the expected £1,800 (Rs 1,20,492). This is largely because people were not sure of the authenticity of the works. Artists who use assistants indiscriminately would do well to learn from this. On the other hand, K K Hebbar, whose oils on canvas are far from decorative, fared well with works selling at between £10,030 (Rs 6,71,408.20) and £6,800 (Rs 4,55,192).

Souza also fared well, with his Fishing Boats selling for £4,000 (Rs 2,67,760), which equalled Ganesh Pyne's Kanchan Pakhi (Golden Bird) and was just a little lower than M F Husain's Woman with a Bird-Cage, which went for £4,200 (Rs 2,81,148).

It is evident that the Indian buyer, even when left to his own devices, fares well enough and Indian contemporary art is slowly coming out of the closet to become part and parcel of global contemporary art. That is why Christie's is now going to follow the Bonham's auction with yet another auction of Indian art in London. There will be about 100 lots of contemporary art in their September auction this year. This augurs well for our contemporary art.