The Collector: Inside One Family's Five Generations of Indian Art

To enter the private archives of the Mittal collection in New Delhi is to step outside the frantic rhythm of twenty-first-century commerce. The room is climate-calibrated to a perpetual 20 degrees Celsius with 50 percent relative humidity; the lighting is strictly fiber-optic and UV-filtered; and the silence is that of a medieval scriptorium.

Here, housed in acid-free solander boxes crafted in London, are more than 1,200 masterworks spanning five centuries of subcontinental art. The collection was begun in the 1890s by a great-great-grandfather who served as a financial advisor to princely durbars across Central India. While his contemporaries invested in British sovereign bonds and European carriages, he acquired illuminated folios from decomposing court manuscripts being dispersed by cash-strapped aristocrats.

'My great-great-grandfather had a simple guiding principle,' explains Harshvardhan Mittal, the family's fifth-generation custodian. 'He used to write in his journals: *We do not own these objects. We are merely the night watchmen hired by history to ensure they survive until morning.* That philosophy has governed our family for 130 years.'

The heart of the collection is an astonishing assemblage of Rajput court paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries. Unlike the naturalistic, documentary realism favoured by the imperial Mughal workshops of Delhi and Agra, the Rajput ateliers — in Mewar, Bundi, Kotah, and Kishangarh — treated painting as an intensely emotional, spiritual, and lyrical art form.

Harshvardhan gently opens a box to reveal a 1740 Kishangarh masterwork depicting Radha and Krishna strolling through a moonlit lotus garden. The figures possess the iconic elongated eyes, arched eyebrows, and transparent muslin drapery characteristic of the master painter Nihal Chand. The pigments — mixed by hand using ground lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, crushed pearls, malachite, cinnabar, and pure gold leaf bound with gum arabic — retain a luminous, gem-like vibrancy that modern chemical acrylics cannot match.

'Look closely at the water ripples,' Mittal whispers. 'The artist used a brush made of three individual squirrel hairs. Each brushstroke was executed with a single, controlled breath. In the Rajput court, painting was not decoration; it was *dhyana* — deep visual meditation.'

Collecting ancient art in India is governed by strict legal and moral codes. Following the passage of the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act of 1972, all historical artworks over one hundred years old must be registered with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and cannot be exported from the country.

While some private collectors historically viewed these regulations as an encumbrance, the Mittal family embraced them wholeheartedly. Every single leaf and bronze in their collection is registered with the government, fully documented with provenance records, and frequently loaned to public institutions for national exhibitions.

'The era of the clandestine, secretive collector is over,' says Mittal. 'If an artwork is locked away in a private safe where scholars cannot study it and the public cannot see it, it is dead. True custodianship requires total transparency, rigorous scholarship, and public sharing.'

Maintaining a five-generation collection in India's harsh climate — where summer temperatures reach 45°C and monsoon rains saturate the air with 90 percent humidity — is a continuous scientific struggle. The Mittals established a dedicated conservation lab on their estate, employing paper conservators trained in Florence and New Delhi.

Conservators use de-acidified water baths, Japanese tissue papers (*kozo*), and reversible wheat-starch adhesives to stabilize flaking pigments and repair century-old insect damage. The family has also digitised their entire holdings at ultra-high 1,200 DPI resolution, creating a public digital archive accessible to scholars and students worldwide free of charge.

In an art market increasingly corrupted by speculative flipping, NFT hype, and transient market trends, the five-generation collector represents an essential cultural counterbalance. They remind us that the highest human relationship with art is not financial ownership, but selfless custodianship.

By shielding these fragile, breathtaking masterpieces from the ravages of war, decay, and greed, private collecting families have preserved the very visual soul of India — ensuring that future generations can look into the eyes of a 300-year-old Kishangarh princess and see their own reflection.