Making Mumbai's Emerging Art World Through Makeshift Practices

India's art world has garnered significant attention as an ‘emerging art world’, but we know little about how such worlds emerge and are experienced by those working within them. This article explores this question of ‘emergence’ through an ethnography of the Mumbai art world. Gallerists, artists and other insiders generally perceive local conditions as insufficient and in-the-making. They juxtapose Mumbai against idealised, more established art worlds, and engage in creative, improvised ‘makeshift’ practices to remedy the limitations they see. Despite their provisional nature, these makeshift practices produce new spaces, networks and mediators in the Mumbai art world: in other words, art worlds emerge through practice.