China exploded onto the global art scene with vision, scale and backing. Africa is surging—with curators, collectors, and institutions investing in talent and rewriting the global script. India? Still stuck in the waiting room.
Will we ever arrive? It’s not impossible. But right now, it’s highly unlikely.
There’s no strategy. No collective vision. No institutional backbone. The government has no budgets. The market is shallow. The critics are polite. The galleries are chasing weddings, not futures.
We have the artists. What we don’t have is alignment. No serious museum culture. No critical writing that bites. No curators willing to disrupt. No collectors willing to build thoughtfully, with long-term conviction. Everyone wants results without doing the work.
While we debate who’s who in Delhi and jockey for booth placement in art fairs, others are rewriting the rules. We’re not even in the game.
India has the material. But without courage, without rigour, and without infrastructure, we’re going nowhere. The world won’t wait.