Vast art collection of debt-ridden Indian national airline a step closer to being acquired by Delhi museum

A collection of nearly 5,000 works owned by Air India, the country’s national airline, is due to be rehomed after the debt-ridden organisation was bought by the Tata Group conglomerate in October. The $2.4bn acquisition of the airline will clear the path for the works to be handed over to the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi (NGMA).

Air India began amassing art in 1953, eventually building up what is now known as the Maharaja Collection, featuring paintings by Indian Modernist masters such as M.F. Husain and V.S. Gaitonde, along with ninth-century Buddhist stone sculptures and works by contemporary artists such as Arpana Caur. Many of the collection’s works were commissioned by Air India, including a porcelain ashtray designed by Salvador Dalí, who bartered with the airline to fly a baby elephant from Bangalore to Geneva as his payment.

Works from the Maharaja Collection were once displayed in Air India’s ticket offices across the country. But with the advent of online booking, business operations were streamlined, and the bulk of the collection was moved to underground storage facilities in the early 2000s.

Plans for NGMA to acquire the collection were already in the works before the airline’s privatisation. In 2017 the Mumbai building that held the collection was due to be put up for sale to help the ailing airline recover losses. But the process was delayed due to challenges in authenticating the vast collection, with a number of works thought to be copies. During this process, reports emerged that the collection was subject to improper storage and even theft. In 2017 the artist Jatin Das filed a police report accusing a former Air India executive of stealing government property after he found his 1991 oil painting Flying Apsara, acquired by Air India, for sale at auction. Subsequently, it was reported by PTI news agency that the airline was “examining how many more former or serving Air India officials could be in possession of such paintings”.

The Ministry of Civil Aviation confirmed on Thursday that the government is yet to estimate the value of the collection.

Officials from NGMA now hope that Tata Group’s acquisition will speed up the ministry’s handover of the collection: “We have been trying to procure these artefacts for a while and it’s an ongoing process,” the museum’s director Adwaita Gadanayak told PTI. “Recently we had a meeting with officials from Air India and now the file [of the transfer] is with the ministry of culture and hopefully we will be able to get them and display them at NGMA,” he added.

But bureaucracy and inefficiency still plague the Indian museums sector, and so the fate of the Maharaja Collection is, for now, up in the air.