In an era of mass production, India’s artisans still painstakingly weave, carve, and paint traditional designs like paisley and mirrorwork by hand. But these popular motifs that have dominated Indian design for centuries have left little room for contemporary work—until recently.

India’s art scene has dramatically changed over the past four years as the international art market heads east in search of new talent. Once unknown modern Indian artists suddenly command attention and considerable profit. Financial firms such as Edelweiss’ Yatra Art Fund bet on Indian art’s appreciation. New York’s Gallery Arts India and San Francisco’s Accion—both of which sell South Asian works—are thriving. In June, Indian paintings comprised nearly $11 million in sales at Christie’s South Asian Contemporary Art auction in London, prompting the venerable house to announce that Indian art was a key category driving its profits this year.

Chintan Upadhyay is a leading contemporary artist in the midst of the nation’s modern art boom. Hailing from Jaipur, a city at the heart of India’s traditional arts, Chintan is the son of a once aspiring modern artist who struggled to overcome the overwhelming national preference for traditional art. Like his father, Chintan focuses on modern works in diverse mediums. His recent exhibition at this year’s Arts Festival of Saint Germain de Pres in Paris, titled New Indians featured painted canvases of babies and fiberglass sculptures of children adorned with images from the “Kamasutra.” Chintan’s oil and acrylic Smart Alec sold for $60,000 at Sotheby’s in New York earlier this year. Formally trained at university in Gujarat, Chintan has traveled across Asia and Europe for art fairs and shows but now calls Mumbai home.

Richa: When did you become interested in modern art?

Chintan: My father was a painter and I was surrounded by art in my youth. However, he focused on purely abstract work in Jaipur, a city in the state of Rajasthan that is well-known as an epicenter of traditional art. My father struggled in Rajasthan to find an appreciation and market for his work since the majority of Rajasthani painters specialize in traditional work like painting the figures in silk miniatures.

Watching my father’s hardship, I actually rejected art as a profession initially and studied science in college in Jaipur. But I realized as a student that art was my calling and that I just needed to physically get out of my father’s influence. I received a well-rounded art training in fine arts at a university in Baroda, Gujarat, and used the critical pedagogy I learned there to create my own voice as a visual artist.

Richa: India has historically been lauded for its traditional, not modern, art. Why are its contemporary artists suddenly popular internationally?

Chintan: India’s modern artists are benefiting not just from an artistic push, but also from an economic and political boom happening countrywide right now. India itself is becoming a “brand” that has attracted global attention, but it’s important to me to note that interest in Indian artists first started among Indians themselves and not from abroad.

As the nation has opened itself up economically, we as a people have become interested in discovering a “new” India. And as the nation has prospered, infrastructure that was once lacking for artists—galleries, public funding, and grants, for example—have started to appear. Now that the market has provided funding, artists themselves have become more ambitious with their works and that energy has attracted worldwide notice.

Richa: How has the recent attention to India’s contemporary art market affected how you work?

Chintan: It’s more important than ever to foster a local market within India for our work. The lack of funding and infrastructure such as gallery space where we could show our work has crippled artists in the past. That’s not the case now— especially in India’s larger cities where we can show our work locally. But the reality is that I show most of my work in India despite international attention. While I don’t think that attention on Indian art is just a trend, an Indian market is the only one which will really make the local market sustainable since it’s a market that will really invest in us after the attention from abroad cools down.

Richa: You are now based in cosmopolitan Mumbai but were raised in Jaipur. How has your hometown reacted to your work?

Chintan: Jaipur still thrives on its ethnic crafts market but unfortunately has been closed for a long time to experimental arts. Earlier in my career, I felt that I needed to leave Jaipur in order to develop my craft to avoid being marginalized. But now Jaipur, like India itself, has changed and grown more accepting of experimental work. I think the city reflects the country’s receptiveness to change. I hope, though, that traditional arts won’t get left behind.

Richa: You created an organization to link urban and rural artists to ensure traditional arts aren’t forgotten. Tell me about it.

Chintan: The organization, called Sandarbh, is an homage to my parents (my mother was a social worker). I helped create it to foster relationships among modern and traditional Indian artists and their work. We develop site-specific projects in rural Indian areas in order to bridge the gap between the quickly developing urban art centers of Mumbai, for example, with isolated rural areas. At first, we connected Indian artists to one another though now we have expanded to include artists from around the world. Essentially, we hope to create a way for urban artists to relate to the rural world so that they do not grow so far apart.

Richa: One of your latest projects, New Indians, has Sandarbh’s spirit since it blends old and new by painting scenes, such as those from the “Kama Sutra,” on the bodies of brightly colored babies. Can you explain the work?

Chintan: These works are hybrids—or a vision of what modern India looks like today: a synthesis of traditional culture mixed with an increasingly cosmopolitan society. The colors—vivid pinks, blues, and reds, are used in traditional Indian art but are used in flat tint form, which makes them “soft” and “violent” at the same time. By representing many of the pictures of male Indian babies, I comment on the preference for baby boys that is still a part of modern India.

Richa: Babies are a central theme in your work. What do they represent?

Chintan: All of my projects are interrelated because they are connected to me and my life. But the pieces are not meant to be autobiographical in any way. Rather, they are about India and the larger world’s transition and response to being in flux. My focus is the homogeneity of things and in particular how our environment is becoming homogenous today as we seek money, politics, and power, particularly at much younger ages. That’s why babies are in my work. All babies look the same, so use of them reflects the tension in India—and in the world—of people aspiring to be accepted, which forces a level of homogeneity.

Chintan Upadhyay is represented by the Galerie Natalie Seroussi in Paris and Ashish Balram Nagpal Gallery in Mumbai.