In one hallway, Bharti Kher’s sculpture Arione’s Sister, 2006, a female figure holding shopping bags, faces a series of the artist’s startling “Hybrid” series of photographic prints of part animal, part female bodies. Another work that makes reference to the human body is Anita Dube’s Silence (Blood Wedding), 1997, a 13-part sculpture that runs down the center of a long dining room table. Each element, made with pieces of actual bone covered with beading, lace and knots of red velvet that look like flesh and internal organs, is housed in a transparent container. Poddar explains that while the artist was making the piece, her father, a doctor, was ill with cancer. “Dube puts her soul into her work,” he says.

Poddar has always been surrounded by art. His family owns about 1,500 Indian folk and tribal objects and textiles, and in the 1970s and ’80s, Lekha, his mother, became a major collector of the Bombay Progressive artists—including F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, Tyeb Mehta and M. F. Hussain—along with painters from the previous generation, such as Ramkinkar Baij, Nandalal Bose and others of the early 20th-century Bengal School. Although he greatly admires those artists, Poddar has developed his own aesthetic sense. “Art was not a new thing for me,” he says. “I had been interested in it since childhood. We would visit museums abroad every summer. But it was a foreign view.”

For seven years, he lived outside India, spending time in Paris, Madrid, New York and various parts of the U.K. and attending the European Business School London, from which he received a degree in business management. In 1997 he returned home with a changed perspective. “I became conscious of the existence of a whole new generation of artists with whom I had things in common. They had traveled. They had access to information. What interested me was this international India in contact with the rest of the world.”

Subodh Gupta, one of the artists he noticed then and with whom he has become particularly close, is now a global star. Gupta’s work is influenced by Marcel Duchamp, although his readymades are familiar objects of contemporary Indian, not Western European, culture; he transforms them by shifting the context. His The Other Thing (Chimta), 2005–06, composed of hundreds of the metal tongs traditionally used to serve naan bread arranged in a glittering pom-pom, is anchored to the wall in one of Poddar’s sitting rooms. The first work by Gupta that the collector acquired was Rani, 2001, a sculpture of a cow in fuchsia fiberglass. The animal, of course, is sacred in India, and such a bold treatment made it “a totally avant-garde work for India at the time,” Poddar says, explaining that Gupta’s conceptual approach has appeared only recently in the nation’s art.

In the middle of Poddar’s parents’ dining room is yet another of Gupta’s creations—Poddar tends to acquire artists in-depth, often creating “solo spaces” in the house. A centerpiece of the collection, the 2006 My Mother and Me, a hut made out of cow dung, references Gupta’s early life: He lost his father when he was very young, and it was his mother who encouraged him to become an artist. The structure is womblike, offering protection and shelter, but it was, at least initially, somewhat disquieting. When it was set up in its luxurious setting, the manure was still fresh and quite malodorous. “Of course it wasn’t easy at first,” says Poddar. “It smelled bad. But luckily the installation took place at a time when my parents were on their summer trip to England.”

“Anupam is obsessed with art,” says his mother. “We talk a lot, particularly about young artists. He looks at society in a totally new way, thanks to art. And thanks to his fresh eye, I am able to see a lot further too.” She collaborated with her son on the Devi Art Foundation, which opened its doors at the end of August in the Delhi suburb of Gurgaon. The 7,500-square-foot space, designed by the young Indian architect Aniket Bhagwat, will hold three exhibitions annually. Its first show, on view through November, is “Still/Moving Image.” It was organized by the Delhi-based art historian and curator Deeksha Nath, who selected from Poddar’s collection photographs, videos and installations by 24 artists, including Shilpa Gupta, Tejal Shah and Vivan Sundaram.