It's a fake! Forged art floods Indian market as masterworks fetch record millions

The Indian art market is struggling with a growing forgery issue as values rise. Renowned artists like MF Husain are frequently faked, leading experts to emphasize provenance and increase authentication efforts in the face of expanding buyer interest.

India’s burgeoning art market has a forgery problem. As prices of works by modern masters soar and a new generation of collectors piles into the market, fakes attributed to MF Husain, FN Souza and SH Raza are increasingly surfacing in the resale trade.

Experts and art dealers are encountering everything from single works to entire bodies of work and even those that have never previously appeared in the market. Experts said provenance and authentication face greater scrutiny just as Indian art is attracting more money and first-time buyers.

While there is no reliable estimate of the number of fakes in the art market, experts told Mint the numbers are growing. Aakriti Art Gallery in Kolkata receives 3-4 requests a week for authentication.

The pool of suspect works has grown with the market and buyer base, with forged and copied works changing hands for lakhs of rupees. This year, one art work came to Aakriti with a “Hussain” sign. Last year, a Husain work sold for about ₹40 lakh to a Delhi businessman was found to be fake by the gallery.

Around the same time, a work attributed to Bikash Bhattacharjee surfaced at an Art Mumbai event. Bhattacharjee’s family clarified to Mint that the oil-on-canvas portrait of a young boy exhibited at Art Mumbai was not an original but a partial copy. The 34-by-34-inch original remains in the family’s custody.

An email was sent to Art Mumbai. The story will be updated when they respond.

India’s art auction turnover jumped 87% to ₹3,041 crore in 2025, while modern art sales rose 43% to ₹1,548 crore in the six months ended June, accounting for almost three-fourths of the market, according to ASIGN, a product and services company built for the art and collectibles ecosystem based in Chennai. Much of the growth was price-led: the average value of an auctioned artwork rose 39% to ₹74 lakh from ₹53 lakh, while the number of works sold increased only 3.2%.

That concentration of value around a relatively small pool of sought-after artists is raising the stakes around authenticity, particularly for names such as VS Gaitonde, Husain, Souza, Raza and Jamini Roy.

“The artist who is most popular and who commands good prices will be faked the most,” Mumbai-based veteran gallerist and auctioneer Dadiba Pundole said. In the case of Gaitonde, he said, virtually every other work offered out there appears questionable.

Experts alleged that many copies originate in art schools, where students reproduce the works of established artists for study. Such works are not meant to be signed but can later enter the market as originals, they claimed.

The challenge is that authentication is still heavily dependent on specialist expertise. Vikram Bachhawat, founder of Aakriti Art Gallery, said, “Sometimes an image is obviously fake; in other cases, even an expert may not be certain. There is no technology which can authenticate a painting,” he said.

Instead, specialists rely on an artist’s style and technique, catalogues, publications, exhibition histories and other documentation to assess a work, he said.

Art critic, writer and curator Uma Nair said the problem extends beyond the artwork itself to the documentation accompanying it. Certificates can be produced relatively easily, she said, making provenance and supporting records as important as the physical work.

“Fakes have increased at least by 25% in the past 10 years. Suddenly everyone has become a collector, and everyone sells masters,” she said.

Nair also pointed to the limited availability of forensic testing for paint, canvas and paper in India. Such analysis can provide additional evidence but is not routinely accessible or economically viable for every transaction. In Europe, she estimates that verifying a single painting can cost about ₹6 lakh.

Bacchawat said advances in large-format printing and reproduction around 2005-06 created another avenue for imitation. He recalled cases involving Husain works reproduced on canvases matching the dimensions of originals, with some such works circulating for years.

“Unfortunately, there is no statistical data to establish whether there are more fakes and forgeries in the market today than there were a decade or two ago,” independent analyst and commentator Venetia Vickers said, adding that auction houses would be best placed to provide such information.

Vickers said the works of certain artists including B. Prabha, Husain, Raza, Roy and Souza have a large number of fakes.

“Many are not even direct copies of known works, but newly created paintings made in an artist’s style, sometimes accompanied by forged signatures,” she said.

Pundole said collectors who were typically in their 40s when he started in the business in the 1980s are increasingly being joined by buyers in their late 20s and early 30s. Many of these new buyers have the financial means to enter the market but limited experience in assessing artists, provenance and the secondary market.

Private transactions and smaller dealers can therefore present a greater challenge, Pundole said, while established galleries and auction houses are more likely to have archives, research and documentation against which works can be assessed.

Auction houses are also placing greater emphasis on provenance and research as the market becomes more international and prices rise. Christie’s India chairman Sonal Singh said provenance, specialist expertise, research and transparency remain central to maintaining the integrity of the auction market.

Sotheby’s worldwide head of modern and contemporary South Asian art, Manjari Sihare-Sutin, said when questions do arise, they may relate to inconsistencies in provenance, materials, condition, stylistic details or historical context, but assessments are never based on a single factor. Trust is built through layers of expertise, research and scrutiny.