Christie's Mumbai represents the world's oldest fine-art auction house making a sustained, if interrupted, effort to establish a physical auction presence on the Indian subcontinent. Launched in 2013, the initiative brought live sales of Indian jewellery, Mughal-era decorative arts, and modern and contemporary Indian art directly to Mumbai — a city whose collector base had long participated in Christie's London and New York sales but had never before hosted a Christie's rostrum on home soil. The venture was suspended after 2018 following a combination of regulatory complexity and market headwinds, before Christie's returned to live auction activity in India in 2023, signalling renewed confidence in the subcontinent as a primary rather than peripheral market.

Background and Strategic Context

Christie's had maintained a representative office in Mumbai well before the 2013 launch of live sales, using it principally to cultivate relationships with Indian collectors and to channel consignments toward its London, New York, and Hong Kong sale rooms. The decision to hold live auctions in Mumbai reflected a broader strategic shift across the major houses during the early 2010s: as wealth accumulation in Asia accelerated, both Christie's and Sotheby's sought to meet collectors in their home markets rather than requiring them to travel to or bid remotely from Western centres. Christie's had already established a significant Hong Kong operation, and Mumbai was positioned as the logical next step for South Asian engagement.

India presented a distinctive opportunity. The country's ultra-high-net-worth population was growing rapidly, and a significant proportion of that wealth was concentrated in families with deep historical connections to jewellery — both as personal adornment and as inherited, dynastic property. Mughal-period pieces, princely-state jewels, and Jaipur kundan and meenakari work occupied a category of cultural patrimony that resonated powerfully with Indian buyers in a way that Western auction catalogues could not fully replicate.

The 2013–2018 Sales Programme

Christie's inaugural Mumbai sale took place in December 2013 at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, a venue whose historical associations with Bombay's mercantile and princely elite lent the occasion considerable symbolic weight. The sale encompassed Indian and international jewellery, Mughal works of art, and modern Indian paintings. Subsequent annual sales followed a broadly similar format, with the jewellery component typically featuring pieces traceable to the workshops of the great Indian gem-setting traditions — elaborate polychrome kundan necklaces, Hyderabadi baroque-pearl ornaments, and gem-set jadau bracelets — alongside more internationally styled signed pieces from European maisons that had been commissioned by or gifted to Indian royalty.

The sales attracted genuine interest from Mumbai's collector community and generated meaningful press coverage, but they also exposed the structural difficulties of conducting regulated auction activity under Indian law. India's import and export regulations governing antique objects — defined under the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act of 1972 as any object more than one hundred years old — imposed significant constraints on the movement of consignments. Bringing historical jewels into India for sale, or exporting them after sale to foreign buyers, required navigating a regulatory framework that had not been designed with international auction practice in mind. Currency repatriation rules and goods-and-services tax implementation after 2017 added further layers of complexity. By 2018, Christie's had concluded that the operational environment made sustainable live sales impractical, and the Mumbai programme was quietly suspended.

Regulatory and Market Challenges

The difficulties Christie's encountered in Mumbai were not unique to that house. The broader challenge of conducting international-standard auction activity in India has been a persistent theme across the art and jewellery market. India's Foreign Exchange Management Act, combined with restrictions on the import of certain categories of antique and artistic property, means that the consignment and settlement workflows standard in London or Hong Kong require substantial adaptation. Indian buyers purchasing at overseas sales have their own currency-export constraints to navigate, which can complicate post-sale settlement even when the auction itself takes place abroad.

The jewellery market in India also operates through a dense network of established family jewellers, private treaty dealers, and informal high-value exchanges among collector families — channels that do not necessarily favour the transparency and public bidding of the Western auction model. For many Indian collectors, the auction room is one option among several, rather than the primary mechanism for acquiring or disposing of significant pieces.

Return to India: 2023 and Beyond

Christie's return to live auction activity in India in 2023 reflected both the maturation of India's collector base and a recalibrated approach to the regulatory environment. Rather than attempting to replicate the full consignment-import-export model of its earlier sales, Christie's structured its renewed Indian presence with greater attention to locally sourced property and to the specific categories — modern and contemporary Indian art, Indian jewellery with clear domestic provenance — where regulatory friction is lowest. The return also coincided with a period of heightened global interest in Indian art and jewellery: Mughal-period works had achieved significant prices at Christie's London and New York, and the broader international market's appetite for Indian material had grown considerably since the house's first Mumbai venture.

The 2023 re-entry was also positioned within Christie's wider Asia strategy, which by that point included not only Hong Kong but also periodic sales in Shanghai and ongoing private-sale activity across Southeast Asia. Mumbai, in this framework, is understood as a market with long-term structural importance — one of the world's largest concentrations of high-net-worth individuals, with a cultural relationship to jewellery and decorative arts that is both deep and commercially significant.

Significance for the Jewellery Market

For the international jewellery trade, Christie's Mumbai operations matter principally because of what they reveal about the direction of the global market for Indian jewellery and Mughal-period objects. When a house of Christie's standing commits resources to a market, it both reflects and reinforces that market's legitimacy in the eyes of international collectors and institutions. The Mumbai sales helped establish price benchmarks for categories of Indian jewellery that had previously traded largely through private channels, and they brought Indian pieces to the attention of international buyers who might not otherwise have encountered them.

The Mughal jewellery category in particular — spinels, large cabochon rubies and emeralds in kundan settings, inscribed gem-set objects — has benefited from sustained auction-house attention, with provenance research and scholarly cataloguing raising the standard of documentation available to buyers and sellers alike. Christie's Mumbai, even in its interrupted form, contributed to that process of formalisation and internationalisation.

Further Reading

• Christie's — Mumbai location and sales history