The advantages Indian art has are many. Our artists' work still hold the price of comparable art abroad. Also, the organic development of our contemporary expression has had a myriad of living folk traditions to plug into, to create a live and varied art that has many points of reference, while its being rooted in the national liberation movement gives it worldwide relevance as decolonisation has been the main trend of the twentieth century.

A trend that is the other side of the coin, the devolution in the imperial states, with increasing democratisation and calls for self-expression for constituent peoples of the imperial centres -- like the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, or even the Cornish, in Britain -- a greater openness and acceptance of the ``other'' has developed allowing us to understand the process as one that accompanies globalisation. This brings with it also an element of ``global prices'', so that inflated western prices are scaled down to create more equitable global ones.

All these trends are visible in the exhibition of 33 artists of the Glasgow Print Studio being shown at the British Council at Delhi, which will then tour Jaipur, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bhubaneswar, Calcutta, Baroda and Mumbai. So, it will be accessible to the viewer. The buyer too has a chance as 60 works are for sale -- and sell at 25 per cent less than what these prints sellfor in Britain. Moreover, being a well-curated show of reflecting the development of the art of print-making in one of the major centres of imperial devolution, Scotland, we can see a form of global evolution which neither the holier-than-thou USA, nor Imperial England can really stomach, except as a sort of slumming or ``changing with the times'' exercise.

Scottish art -- at least from what we can see of it in this print show -- shows signs of genuine globalisation: that is, a new feeling for one's autonomous self-expression as well as accepting those elements in the expression of others that are as good, at par. Obviously, the democraticdevolution of old imperial centres gives us a new trend in global art that is likely to develop in the coming century. As such, the best artists in the show are worth investing in.

In this respect, India's Dhruva Mistry, with two figurative etchings, From the North I and IV, is a good buy. First, he already has a market here, and the fact that that he has been able to infuse his work with global relevance, makes his prints worth buying even if the price seems a little high at Rs 17,000 each. There are other reasons to recommend hiswork.

First, it is figurative. And the trend in Scotland in its present state of development, is away from American-style abstraction of the sort one sees in the work of Philip Reeves or the photo-realism of David Palmer, towards a very folk-art like expression (so Third World in its presentation), that is dominant today.

It would, of course, be wrong to see this as a transplant of India and other colonies. It was there from the very beginning in Scotland and the three wood-cuts of Willie Rodger, Removing Eye-lashes, Interval and Woman Adjusting Ear-rings are proof of it. These wood-cuts also reflect the close relation between folk-expression and democratisation ofcivil society. All three prints, a take-off on the theme of women as commodities for voyeurs and conscious of selling themselves, can be seen as a pro-feminist view in a patriarchal society. At Rs 6,300 each, these are an excellent buy. They are probably the best buy in the whole show, as Rodger is an early practitioner of a trend that is now dominant.

The other artists who can be said to be worth investing in at the price are David Mach at Rs 17,000 and Rs 14,000. Mach is already represented in the Tate and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. In other words, he is already a force to reckon with in Britain. So a buyer who buys his work in India should be able to get a better price in Europe. Stuart Duffin'sexcellent buy at Rs 9,000, reflecting a complete control over the medium as well as being contemporary in concern, reflecting Scottish art at its best.

And for those who go in for radical art, playwright John Byrme's Harlequin with Guitar and Beach Boy with Cat and Fish, Ken Currie's Battlefield and Peter Howson's Bosnian War prints are recommended.

Though for sheer value for money, David Palmer's Studio Jug at Rs 6,650 is something that should be avoided. There is much here for the global art investor. He or she should look out for works not typically Scottish or English, but opening up to the world and original. For they are the best examples of dead Imperial ``Eurotrash'' being replaced by a world of concern to humanity as a whole, and hence, with a future in the world market.