In April 2012 more than a few visitors to the DLF Place mall in Saket, New Delhi, believed they had come upon an unconventional retail display of stainless steel pots and pans in the form of a soaring mushroom cloud, nearly 33 feet tall. The installation was, in fact, the monumental sculpture Line of Control, a 2008 work by Subodh Gupta, the reigning star of contemporary Indian art. The baffled visitors had unknowingly left the mall proper and entered the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), an 18,000-square-foot exhibition space that opened in 2011 and bears the name of the collector, patron, and philanthropist who founded it.

Line of Control debuted in London in the 2009 Tate Triennial, which is where Nadar first encountered the piece. “Overwhelmed,” as she describes it, by the work’s “awe-inspiring” nature, she decided on the spot to acquire it for KNMA, India’s first private museum for modern and contemporary art. “It is one of the most phenomenal works any artist could have done. I had to have it,” Nadar said with conviction when asked if she had considered the logistical challenge that transporting and installing such a gargantuan work would present. Shipped to India in four containers, the 15-section sculpture was assembled over seven days by the team that had set it up at Tate Britain. The ceiling of the mall’s basement was reinforced to bear the colossal load, and a nearby shop front had to be dismantled to make way for the three cranes required for the sculpture’s assembly. Nadar remains mum about the amount she paid Hauser & Wirth, the gallery that represents Gupta internationally. “It wasn’t cheap,” is all she has been willing to share.

One outcome of this spectacular purchase is the emergence of Line of Control as a visual magnet to lure mall-goers who might otherwise not visit the museum, where admission is free. “We hope that the viewership of Subodh’s piece will bring more traction for the museum,” Nadar explained at the April press conference marking the unveiling of Line of Control. Although Gupta’s work has won critical accolades and collector support on the international art circuit, his intricate assemblages had never been presented to a popular audience in India. For Gupta, who was present at the press conference, the thrill lay in having the work — whose shape alludes to the potentially deadly tension along the India-Pakistan border — displayed in his native country. “An artist couldn’t be prouder to have his work come home,” he said.

A comparable commitment to home and heritage motivates Nadar, and a key mission of KNMA is to bring significant art by Indian modernists back to India so the full range of the country’s art history can be viewed and appreciated. In 2010, for example, she paid a record breaking $3.5 million at Christie’s London for Saurashtra, a 1983 painting by Syed Haider Raza. The artist was a central figure in the Bombay-based Progressive Artists Group, which was established in 1947 and included Maqbool Fida Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee, and Francis Newton Souza. Discouraged by the lack of a thriving art scene and the dearth of indigenous collectors, Raza, like many of his contemporaries, moved abroad. He lived in Paris for six decades before returning to New Delhi in 2011. Saurashtra came from the French collector who had bought the work directly from Raza. A large, square canvas featuring geometrically arranged blocks of reds and oranges and the bindu motif, symbolizing spiritual consciousness, Saurashtra was Nadar’s most famous acquisition prior to Line of Control and was displayed prominently on one of the four red walls that framed a section of KNMA’s 2012 show “Crossings: Time Unfolded II.” That show also included Souza’s electrifying The Red Road, a 1962 landscape whose palette and coarse texture are influenced by laterite, the rust-red soil of his birthplace, Goa, a coastal state south of Mumbai.

Nadar’s pursuit of art isn’t limited to acquiring high-priced, high-profile works abroad, though several Indian art critics have grumbled, especially after she paid £993,250 ($1.5 million) at Sotheby’s London in 2010 for Bharti Kher’s The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, 2006, a life-size fiberglass elephant with Kher’s trademark bindis affixed across its surface. Her collecting is part of a larger philanthropic vision she shares with her husband, Shiv Nadar, who founded a technology start-up in 1976 that has grown into the global behemoth HCL Enterprises. She began to acquire art in the late 1980s with the simple aim of decorating her walls. “I started collecting for our home, which we were building at the time. There was no thought of a museum,” she explains. “I commissioned art from Husain and bought works by Manjit Bawa and Rameshwar Broota; all three pieces are still in the house.”

Nadar’s acquisitions budget — and her vision — grew with her husband’s success. The two met when Nadar was working for an advertising agency, and they soon became bridge partners. (She continues to play competitive bridge and has represented India in international tournaments.) HCL was flourishing, and Nadar, not content with being the idle wife of an entrepreneur, became instrumental in the company’s philanthropic and educational initiatives, which include the Shiv Nadar Foundation, established in 1996, and Shiv Nadar University, which had its first graduating class in 2011. She was on Forbes Asia magazine’s “48 Heroes of Philanthropy” list in 2010; her husband followed one year later.