Mumbai, May 5 -- Back in 2006, at a modern and contemporary Indian art sale by Sotheby's auction house in London, a bidding war over a work by Francis Newton Souza drove up the Goan modernist's work to over 600,000 pounds ($1.1 million). The underbidder who lost out was Neville Tuli, whose paddle became a topic of conversation in subsequent news articles. An auctioneer himself, he went on to bring home five miniatures, a work by a mid-19th century Belgian painter, as well as a Ram Kumar and an untitled Akbar Padamsee. His morning's expenditure was a handsome 663,000 pounds ($1.25 million), The Art Newspaper reported. Tuli, now in his 60s, has been a contentious figure in the Indian art scene ever since he set up The Tuli Foundation for Holistic Education & Art (HEART) in 1995. In 2000, he started Osian's Connoisseurs of Art Private Limited (OCA) in Mumbai. His aim, he once told a journalist, was to create "the greatest arts and culture institution in the world". He authored a book on Contemporary Indian art, held large exhibitions of not only art but also film memorabilia, with society's who's who in attendance, and conducted auctions. He also collected widely, from Hollywood memorabilia to Japanese Samurai masks and modern Indian artists as well as contemporary Indian art. Over the course of the following decade, he established an archiving, research and documentation centre, a wealth management service, an art authentication and valuation service, a film festival, an art journal, and even sponsored a team in Durand Cup Football. In 2006, OCA launched Osian's Art Fund that was, at one time, valued at Rs.100 crore. However, by 2013, Tuli had lost much of the goodwill, art and money he had accumulated in the past decade. The Art Fund crashed during the global recession of 2008 and forced Tuli to contend with a liquidity crisis and an angry crowd of influential stakeholders and litigious investors; he faced criticism for scaling up his organisation too fast, and for driving up the price of modern and contemporary art indiscriminately. In 2013, the Securities Exchange Board of India ordered the Art Fund to be closed. A few years later, prominent scholars and gallerists questioned the provenance of some of the works of an Osian's auction in New Delhi. Tuli denied all charges of inauthenticity at the time. But by then, he had sold his home in Mumbai and moved to Delhi and relative obscurity. "I needed space with gardens and animals. I realized that I was totally ignorant of the Internet. At one point of time, I was totally against an artwork becoming a thumbnail. I thought it was a desecration of the aesthetics of art object," Tuli said. That is no longer the case. On April 30, he launched tuliresearchcentre.org, part of what he claims is "the world's single largest knowledge base on the last 250 years of India". The website named after his new organisation registered in 2023 - TRIS - carries information about different aspects of Indian art, culture and heritage, divided across 16 research categories "to create the first framework for India Studies," Tuli said. "I came back to India with one objective and only one objective. How to change what I thought was a deeply mediocre, totally unjust educational framework that did not give access to everyone or generate any joy or possess the quality which great learning and knowledge gives," said Tuli....