By V. Sanjay Kumar, PGP 1982
Synopsis:
Salil Gupta and his daughter Nupur belong to a Delhi business family that has no acquaintance with art. He wants to collect art, she wants to be a curator. But the art world is a walled garden that does not admit outsiders easily. Father and daughter shake up the auction business and make up a reality show set around the lives of chosen artists. It carries a million-dollar prize. Who can resist the lure of big money for wilful behaviour on camera?
The Mumbai art scene takes centre stage. In contention for the prize are a bohemian artist whose drug-filled existence fuels her art, an artist duo out to engineer a social upheaval, a performance artist who is a career rebel, and the daughter of a framer fighting conservative forces. As the contest heats up with participants going all out to win the million dollars, matters hurtle to a fatal denouement.
A tart-sweet delight of a novel, This Garden of Weeds is a witty and expert defenestration of the incestuous art world.
About the author:
V. Sanjay Kumar (PGP 1980-82) has published six works of fiction with Hachette India, Juggernaut, Bloomsbury, and Akashic Books in the USA. The art world has been his muse since 1988. As a director of Sakshi Gallery, he has been privy to the growth of the Indian art scene and global developments in the last few decades. His experience in setting up finance and software businesses helped him understand the art market. This has then been a long journey from philistine to novice to participant and now to gadfly. Artist, Undone, his first novel, was an outsider’s journey. This second foray is an insider’s view into this opaque, mysterious, bristly, yet beguiling world of art.
