Ole! Ole!

Maneka Gandhi's Rs 1.5 crore fundraiser has helped a collector make a bid to create India's first museum of oleograph prints.

When Arjun Sharma spent Rs 28 lakh last week to buy 220 oleographs, he was buying into a collective Indian consciousness .

"When I was growing up," he recalls, "all the images of gods in my grandparents' home used to be prints of Raja Ravi Varma's works." That was true for practically every Indian home in the early half of the last century.

Professionally, Sharma is a travel agent and real estate developer; personally, he is an avid art collector. "But I never thought oleographs could be collected," he says.

That's where Maneka Gandhi comes into the picture. The politican's annual fundraiser for People for Animals is a part of the Delhi calendar, and every year she does a different (and controversial, because she doesn't mind stepping on people's corns and egos) exhibition to collect funds for her favourite project.

This year, to commemorate Ravi Varma's death centenary, she picked on his oleographs and lithographs (many of them part of Sir C P Ramaswami Aiyar's collection) to sell.

Gandhi is known for her bluntness, and she's usually successful in raising large sums from these exhibitions. The worth of the 600 oleographs on sale this year is Rs 1.5 crore, with prices set between Rs 5,000-1 lakh for each. Already, half the works have been sold, so you'll see only a few unsold oleographs by the time the exhibition opens later this week.

What's interesting is that Sharma is hoping to use his collection for public display. "I want those who like the works of India's first modern painter, or students, to be able to see his work. I'm thinking, therefore, of putting them on permanent display for a small ticketed charge," he said.

The Raja Ravi Varma gallery could form part of the City Select Walk retail and entertainment hub that Sharma is completing this year in Saket, New Delhi. "Or," he muses, "we could build our forthcoming hotel project in Jaipur around this collection."

If that happens "" and Sharma is hoping to interest art students to help him catalogue it as well as include the material in a forthcoming book "" he'll start to build on the Varma collection more seriously.

This tranche is his first ever buy of Ravi Varmas, and "it's probably just 10-15 per cent of the 4,000-5,000 works by the artist", he says. "I now hope to collect more, and build the largest collection of prints by the artist, so that they can be seen together and not as fragmented parts of the great artist's heritage."

If you're inclined to buy into that inheritance, the unsold oleographs will be on sale at New Delhi's Intercontinental The Grand from August 11-15.