About
To make India's art, heritage and culture more accessible, engaging and educational, and to offer younger Indians a critical and compassionate framework for discovering their cultural inheritance.
Sarmaya Arts Foundation is a Mumbai-based not-for-profit museum and archive, run by the Sarmaya Trust and founded in 2015 by collector and patron Paul Abraham. It holds a cross-disciplinary collection of Indian art and artefacts, numismatics, cartography, photography, rare books, folk and contemporary art, and makes it public through a gallery in Fort, exhibitions, the Sarmaya Talks lecture series, digital storytelling and the patronage of endangered art forms.
Sarmaya Arts Foundation began as one collector's attempt to share a lifetime of wonder. The name Sarmaya is Urdu for collective or shared wealth, and that idea is the heart of the project. Founded in 2015 by Paul Abraham, a former chief operating officer of IndusInd Bank, Sarmaya started as a passion project with his late wife Tina: a virtual museum that would make the family's large private collection of Indian art and historical artefacts accessible to everyone and spark conversations about the subcontinent's past. Today the organisation is shaped by the shared vision of Abraham and his partner Pavitra Rajaram, and is run by the Sarmaya Trust.
The collection is deliberately wide-ranging, crossing categories that museums usually keep apart. It spans numismatics, the coins that trace the rise and fall of Indian dynasties, cartography and historical maps, early photography, engravings, rare books, indigenous and folk art, living traditions, and modern and contemporary art, amounting to roughly fifteen hundred artefacts. Alongside it sits a research library of some fifteen thousand books ranging across history, art, architecture, archaeology, aesthetic theory and natural history.
Sarmaya has described itself as a museum without boundaries, and its history reflects that restlessness. It grew from a dream in Delhi into a digital museum, took physical form through exhibitions in Mumbai from Dadar to Kala Ghoda, and in late 2024 opened a permanent public-facing archive, gallery and event space inside the restored, 146-year-old Lawrence and Mayo building on Dr DN Road in Fort, Mumbai. Its debut exhibition, Portrait of a Nation, opened in January 2018 with rare nineteenth-century photography of the subcontinent, and later shows such as High Seas, Open Roads and the 2022 collaboration Echoes of the Land have taken the collection to new audiences.
Around the collection Sarmaya runs a full programme of exhibitions, educational outreach, workshops, films and curated travel experiences, along with the Sarmaya Talks lecture series, whose speakers have included Devdutt Pattanaik, Javed Akhtar, Nayanjot Lahiri, Mallika Sarabhai, Manu S Pillai and Rudrangshu Mukherjee. Its digital storytelling, through series such as Sarmaya Spotlight and Forgotten Files and a partnership with Google Arts and Culture, carries lesser-known stories from Indian history and art to a wide online audience.
Sarmaya is also a patron. It works directly with Indian artists to sustain endangered traditions, commissioning new work in Rajasthani miniature painting, Andhra shadow puppetry (Tholu Bommalata), Bengal pattachitra scroll painting and Gujarat's Mata-ni-Pachedi textile painting. Its most sustained commission has been the Issanama, or Christ Commission, a long collaboration between Paul Abraham and the third-generation miniaturist Manish Soni of Bhilwara, Rajasthan, that reimagines the life of Christ in the visual language of Indian miniature painting.
Visit & Access
Founding & Leadership
Paul Abraham, a former chief operating officer of IndusInd Bank, is a collector, history enthusiast and patron who founded Sarmaya in 2015 as a passion project with his late wife Tina. The foundation is now shaped with his partner Pavitra Rajaram.
Initiatives & Portfolio
A cross-disciplinary collection of roughly 1,500 artefacts spanning numismatics, cartography, photography, engravings, rare books, indigenous and folk art, living traditions and modern and contemporary art.
A public-facing archive, gallery and event space in the restored 146-year-old Lawrence and Mayo building in Fort, Mumbai, open since late 2024, with a research library of around 15,000 books.
A rolling exhibitions programme, from the debut Portrait of a Nation (2018, 19th-century photography) to High Seas, Open Roads and the 2022 collaboration Echoes of the Land with Ojas Art.
A public lecture series whose speakers have included Devdutt Pattanaik, Javed Akhtar, Nayanjot Lahiri, Mallika Sarabhai, Manu S Pillai and Rudrangshu Mukherjee.
Online storytelling through series such as Sarmaya Spotlight and Forgotten Files and a partnership with Google Arts and Culture, extending the collection to a wide online audience.
Sustained commissions supporting endangered traditions including Rajasthani miniature painting, Andhra Tholu Bommalata shadow puppetry, Bengal pattachitra and Gujarat's Mata-ni-Pachedi, notably the Issanama (Christ Commission) with miniaturist Manish Soni.
Educational outreach, workshops, film screenings and curated travel experiences that extend the collection into active learning.
Sarmaya matters because it treats a private collection as a public good and dissolves the usual walls between disciplines. By holding coins, maps, photographs, rare books, folk art and contemporary work in a single collection and reading them together, it offers a connected view of the subcontinent's history that few Indian museums attempt. Its self-description as a museum without boundaries is not a slogan but a method: it questions what a museum is for and who it is for.
Its second contribution is patronage of the endangered. Through sustained commissions in Rajasthani miniature painting, Tholu Bommalata shadow puppetry, Bengal pattachitra and Mata-ni-Pachedi, Sarmaya gives traditional artists the time and support to experiment rather than merely survive, keeping fragile lineages of practice alive. Its public programming, the Sarmaya Talks, workshops and widely followed digital series, extends that work outward, offering younger Indians a critical and compassionate framework for discovering their own cultural inheritance. For the Atlas, Sarmaya is a significant privately founded museum and a genuine node connecting collection, scholarship and living artistic practice.
[Atlas Perspective] Sarmaya Arts Foundation is one of the more thoughtful privately founded cultural institutions to emerge in India in the last decade. Built from the personal collection of Paul Abraham and now led with Pavitra Rajaram under the Sarmaya Trust, it has grown from a digital museum into a public archive, gallery and event space in a restored heritage building in Fort, Mumbai, holding roughly fifteen hundred artefacts and a fifteen-thousand-book library across numismatics, cartography, photography, rare books, folk art and contemporary work.
The Atlas assessment is that Sarmaya's significance lies in its integrative approach and its patronage. Few institutions read coins, maps, photographs and folk painting as a single conversation, and fewer still back that with sustained commissions to artists working in endangered traditions such as Tholu Bommalata, pattachitra and Mata-ni-Pachedi. Its Sarmaya Talks series and digital storytelling give it a public reach well beyond its physical footprint.
As a privately funded museum with a genuine collection, an active exhibitions and lecture programme and a real artist-patronage practice, Sarmaya is well-positioned to become one of the reference private museums of western India, alongside institutions like the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and the Museum of Art and Photography. For the Atlas it is also a natural hub linking the traditional art forms it patronises to the artists who keep them alive.