Vaccine billionaire buys $17.9m Raja Ravi Varma, setting new record for Indian painting at auction

Raja Ravi Varma’s oil painting “Yashoda and Krishna” (1890s) set a new auction record for a South Asian painting when it hammered at $15 million ($17.9 million with fees, or 1,672 million Indian rupees) at Saffronart in Mumbai on 1 April, beating its $8.6 million–$12.9 million estimate. The work was bought by Indian pharmaceuticals billionaire Cyrus Poonawalla, founder of the Serum Institute in Pune, who said he would try to make the painting available for periodic public viewing. The sale surpassed the previous record-holder, M.F. Husain’s “Gram Yatra,” which sold for $13.7 million with fees at Christie’s New York in March 2025, and it exceeded Varma’s prior auction record of $4.5 million set in 2023 for another “Yashoda and Krishna” scene. The overall South Asian art record cited remains $24.6 million for a 12th-century black stone bodhisattva figure sold at Christie’s New York in 2017.

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