Model cars, furniture: What’s driving the craze for collectibles in India?

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Sports memorabilia as collectibles, one would expect. It wasn’t such a surprise when Neeraj Chopra’s Olympic gold-winning javelin sold for 1.5 crore in October. Cars, coins, art, watches, jewellery and fiction’s first editions have been collectors’ items for as long as they’ve been around.

But in Mysuru, Neil and Clyde D’Costa, aka the D’Costa brothers, have over 2,000 miniature scale models of automobiles, which they buy from stores around the world; and a side collection of pens with different mechanisms. Auction houses such as Princeps, AstaGuru and Saffronart’s StoryLTD division regularly auction items such as maps and furniture. These are now collectibles too.

From its founding in 2008 until 2015, for instance, AstaGuru dealt mainly in art. In 2015, the auction house held its first collectibles sale, featuring a number of categories that have since become dedicated segments: timepieces, jewellery, celebrity memorabilia, numismatic artefacts, antiques, furniture.

Rare, handcrafted antiques are finding more takers, says Siddanth Shetty, vice-president of business strategy at AstaGuru, because consumers want to connect with their roots. “Such pieces become a celebration of the buyer’s own heritage as much as a specimen of rare craftsmanship and history,” he says.

The big change over the past decade has been the emergence of online resources. “This has helped in two ways: First, research is a lot easier. This is important because the story behind the object is as fascinating as the object itself. Second, thanks to online sellers and auction sites, availability is better, and there is very transparent price discovery,” says Piyush Khaitan, the Bengaluru based co-founder of financial services start-up NeoGrowth Credit, who has amassed over 6,000 pieces of Air India memorabilia over the past six years.

Khaitan runs the website airindiacollector.com, featuring photographs, old airline tickets, boarding passes, baggage tags, ads, posters, even letters written by Bobby Kooka, the famed creator of the Maharaja mascot.

The pride of his collection is a print of a 17-minute promotional film from 1974 titled To Serve is to Love, which was directed by Zafar Hai, with music by sarangi mestro Ram Narayan, and won a National Award. Khaitan hunted for a print for years and, just when he’d all but given up, “by sheer providence, I managed to get a pristine copy preserved by a processing lab in Pittsburgh, at auction. I also managed to locate a conservation lab in the US and got the film digitised.”

In a world of digitised everything, that’s another element of allure that the collectible holds: it’s a physical artefact, a rare one, representing tangible history, value, authenticity.

Viewed from this lens, even specimens of items that were once mass-produced acquire immense value. Film memorabilia collector SMM Ausaja, for instance, counts among his most prized possessions specimens of each of the six posters released for the film Sholay in 1975. Each can now fetch up to 2 lakh.

In a full-circle moment, some of this memorabilia is making waves as non-fungible tokens or NFTs (digital-only assets that exist within the blockchain). In October, Indian NFT platform Beyond Life sold an Amitabh Bachchan NFT collection for a total of almost $1 million ( 7.6 crore). These included digital versions of poems by his father, the famed poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan, recited by Bachchan; and seven autographed posters.

When it comes to physical artefacts, however, “the rare collectibles market is not yet at a stage where buyers are making bids on these items as investments,” says art advisor Farah Siddiqui. It’s a way to indulge a passion, stand out from the crowd.

The transition from a hobbyist’s market to one of serious investment requires awareness. “India, unfortunately, is not proactive in its love for heritage. Collectibles platforms need to position the artefacts as investment options, parallel to their artistic and heritage value,” says Ausaja. “Fans and collectors alone won’t bring in commerce. The valuation of such content would go up faster if it were modelled as a dependable investment too.”

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