Anupam Poddar is only thirty-three, but collecting is in his blood: his mother, Lekha Poddar, has major holdings of work by the older generation of Indian artists – Tyeb Mehta, Maqbool Fida Husain and Francis Newton Souza, among others – and they discuss most purchases together. Appropriately, perhaps, one of Poddar’s key acquisitions is My Mother and Me, a hut made of cow dung by artist Subodh Gupta. Next year Poddar opens India’s first foundation for the visual arts, the Devi Art Foundation, a not-for-profit space situated in a corporate office in Delhi that will showcase both his and his mother’s collections. Between them they have some 2,000 works, including Anupam’s holdings of Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, T.V. Santosh, N.S. Harsha and Ravinder Reddy, among others. The shows at Devi – three a year – will feature Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan artists as well as examining the Indian avantgarde and work by the diasporic community. Is he interested in non-Indian artists? “It is a lot of work keeping my energies focused on the region, so for the moment, no”, he says, “and I also have a hotel to run.” The family fortune comes from paper, and from a chain of hotels.