As the fall auctions begin today with Asian sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the Indian art boom is set to rival the one for Chinese contemporary art. China’s slide toward free-market–style capitalism has brought a batch of eager collectors to the auction market, fueling the surge in prices for Chinese art in the past two years. The booming Indian economy, with more than 20 billionaires and counting, according to Forbes, has set off a similarly fast-growing market for its modern and contemporary art.

Both houses are expecting big returns on eight sales of Chinese, Indian, Southeast Asian, Japanese, and Korean art, some placing traditional objects, ceramics, and cutting-edge contemporary works side by side.

Sotheby’s estimates its sales will bring between $39.8 and $55.8 million, $12 million alone from two sales of modern and contemporary Indian art — the same figure Christie’s is predicting for its single session dedicated to the genre.

Such expectations are quite a change from Asian auctions of the past, often dry sessions where specialist buyers would bid conservatively on blue and white porcelain and archaic bronzes. Given the outstanding performance of contemporary Chinese and Indian art during the spring season at both houses, the week’s sales are set to be a very different affair.

A cache of rare sculptures, bronzes, and ceramics is also set to bring in brisk business.

Christie’s ushers in its Asia Week with a sale of Chinese ceramics and traditional works of art this morning, featuring bronzes, Ming Dynasty vases, and Buddhist sculpture, including a jade beaker with bronze mount from the second century B.C.E. (estimate $500,000–$600,000), and a polychrome wood figure of a corpulent bodhisattva from the 12th-century Jin dynasty (estimate $600,000–$800,000).

Its rival, Sotheby’s, offers its own diverse group of Chinese furniture along with bronzes and Tang pottery on Thursday, in a sale expected to bring between $13.4 million and $18.6 million. Highlights include a pair of rare painted pottery horses and grooms in a naturalistic style from the Tang Dynasty, estimated in the region of $1 million, and several Chinese archaic bronzes — the pinnacle of Chinese art from the 15th to the 5th century B.C.E.— including an intricately decorated tapir vessel with a high estimate of $700,000.

Sotheby’s own run of Asian sales starts with Indian art, including miniatures and modern paintings. The focus of today’s sale is the group of Indian Modernists known as the Progressive Artists Group, which includes some of its most important 20th-century artists: Francis Newton Souza, Ram Kumar, Maqbool Fida Husain, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, and Tyeb Mehta.

Last September, Christie’s sold a painting by the 81-year-old Mumbai-based Mr. Mehta, “Mahisasura” (1997), for $1.584 million, setting a record for an Indian painting at auction. (The previous record, $396,800, was set the day before, for an untitled abstraction by Mr. Kumar.)

The Indian sale at Sotheby’s includes an untitled painting from Mr. Mehta’s Falling Figure series of a toppling rickshaw driver captured with minimal lines and with a debt to Francis Bacon. It is expected to meet its high estimate of $1 million. A yellow, Zen-inspired abstraction by Mr. Gaitonde, also untitled, carries a slightly lower estimate.

A meditative 1975 abstraction by that artist sold for $1.5 million in March at Christie’s, which is combining both Modern and contemporary Indian art this season into a single session tomorrow. That sale follows a highly successful series of sales in New York, Hong Kong, and Mumbai in the spring totaling more than $26 million, making the house the market leader in Indian art.

The sale includes several paintings by Souza, represented by a remarkable series of works including “Nyasa Negress with Flowers of Thorns,” a Picasso influenced nude ($400,000–$600,000); the expressionist “Red Tower with Trees,” and “Man and Woman,” a dark painting mixing Catholic imagery and the brush strokes of Georges Rouault (both $300,000–$500,000).

Souza’s “A Man with Monstrance,” a thick and gestural figurative painting influenced by the artist’s devout Roman Catholic background, is a highlight of Sotheby’s Indian sale, carrying an estimate of $500,000–$700,000.

Its smaller sale of contemporary Indian art on Friday, the first of its kind at the auction house and featuring artists born after the partition of India in 1947, spotlights a burgeoning market. Most of the artists are making their auction debut, many having only recently begun to participate in international museum shows.

The sale builds on that momentum and brings them into the auction market, highlighting one of the oddities about contemporary Indian art: Auctions, rather than galleries, have quickly become the primary market for prominent artists including Atul Dodiya and Subodh Gupta.

The artists known as the Bombay Boys, who include Messrs. Dodiya and Gupta, are the stars of Sotheby’s contemporary sale (they’re also prominent in Christie’s combined sale). Most of the artists mix traditional and contemporary styles — heavy on photorealism and urban kitsch. Mr. Dodiya, whose work has cropped up at auction in recent years, is one of the artists whose creations are being coveted by collectors. Eight years ago, works by the artist ranged in price from $4,000–$6,000; a large format piece such as “Mirage,” a metaphorically rich painting on a shopkeeper’s shutter, now carries an estimate of $180,000–$200,000 at Sotheby’s.

The Christie’s sale includes an allegorical collage by Mr. Dodiya ($80,000–$120,000), as well as a group of important works by Indian modernist Syed Haider Raza, spanning his career from early figurative landscapes to his later abstract style.

Sotheby’s sale of contemporary Chinese, Korean, and Japanese art tomorrow follows from its inaugural record-setting sale last March, which nearly doubled its upper estimate with $13 million in sales, and set 20 artist records. The sale this week is expected to bring in between $16.6 and $23.5 million.

The highlight of the furious bidding last time around was the auction debut of Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang, whose large-scale portrait, “Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120,” sold for nearly $1 million, against an estimate of $350,000. Sotheby’s has eight paintings from the same series by the artist in its sale, two of which have a high estimate of a half-million dollars.

But the highlight might be the diptych by Chen Danqing, “Street Theatre,” a juxtaposition of historical images from Tiananmen Square and the liberation of Chartres after World War II, carrying an estimate in the region of $1.5 million.

Unlike Sotheby’s, Christie’s won’t hold a dedicated sale of Chinese art this week, but rather has placed Chinese art in its Post-War and Contemporary auctions in November. The first auction house to offer a Chinese contemporary work of art in an evening sale — Cai Guo Qiang’s “A Certain Lunar Eclipse (Project for Humankind No. 2),” which sold for $229,500 in 2002 — Christie’s is putting highly sought-after Chinese artists such as Messrs. Xiaogang, Guangyi, and Zhang Huan alongside Western artists like Mark Rothko, Damien Hirst, and Jeff Koons.

A rare 13th-century wood sculpture of a guardian from the entrance of a Buddhist temple is the highlight of Christie’s sale of Japanese and Korean art on Thursday, which mixes ceramics, armor and sculpture with modern and contemporary Korean art. The latter, one of the sleepier areas of Asian art, seems poised to break out. Many lots in the sale carry high estimates below $10,000, but if the trend continues, those kinds of price tags will soon be a thing of the past.