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Last updated: July 15, 2023 at 00:27 AM IST
Indian soldiers on the Champs-Elysées in a military parade on July 14, 1916.
French President Emmanuel Macron gifted Prime Minister Narendra Modi a framed facsimile photo from 1916 of Paris presenting flowers to a Sikh officer.
Officials here said French President Emmanuel Macron gifted Prime Minister Narendra Modi a 1916 replica of Paris giving flowers to a Sikh officer and a replica Charlemagne chess, dating back to the 11th century. Macron also gifted Moody with a series of novels – A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) by Marcel Proust, published between 1913 and 1927 and considered the most important work of French literature of the early 20th century.
The photo, dated 1916, was taken on the Champs Elysees during the July 14th military parade by a photo reporter from the news agency Maurice. The original is in the National Library of France. The photo shows a bystander presenting flowers to a Sikh Viceroy’s Commissioning Officer (VCO) of the Indian Expeditionary Force (IEF) deployed to France.
At the time this photo was taken, the Battle of the Somme, in which the IEF was fighting, had already begun. In World War I, 1.3 million Indians volunteered to fight for Britain, including 877,000 combatants. More than 70,000 of them lost their lives, including about 9,000 in France and Belgium.
Most of these fighters were from the warring peoples of the north of the Indian subcontinent, such as the Sikh soldiers who were marching down the Champs-Elysées, and this picture honors the Indian soldiers who fought in Europe on the side of France in 1914-1918, in the context of several Indian battalions participating in the parade on 14 July 2023.
It also evokes India and France’s long-running joint fight to defend universal values. Officials said Chaturanga, the common ancestor of European and Chinese chess, appeared in India as early as the seventh century AD.
The Charlemagne chessmen get their name from the legend that they were given as a gift to the Frankish Emperor by the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid. In fact, they were made at the end of the eleventh century, probably in southern Italy, given the equipment used by the figures and the presence of elephants as bishops.
The original chess pieces are stored in the Cabinet des Medailles in the National Library of France and were formerly in the sacristy of Saint-Denis Church. This reproduction, which was gifted to the Prime Minister, is made of PLA cast in bronze and consists of 16 pieces available to the player at the beginning of the chess game a king, a queen, two bishops, two knights, two rooks, and eight pawns.
The chess game was made by the French startup Cosmyx 3D, which specializes in 3D printing of artistic and technical objects, which participated in the Fabriqu en France (Made in France) exhibition this year. Officials said the unique item represented both the long history of trade between India and Europe, with the elephant piece reminiscent of the Indian origins of chess, and the French companies’ expertise with regard to innovation and new technologies.
Macron also endowed Modi Le temps retrouve (Retracing time), the seventh and final volume of Proust’s famous series of novels A la recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time). This fourth volume of A la recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time) from the Bibliothque de la Pleiade includes the last two volumes of the original work, Albertine Despars (The Fugitive) and Le temps retrouve (Time Regained), a number of drafts and outlines by The author and many academic comments. It was published in 1989.
Macron also gifted Moody the English edition, Everyman’s Library, which also includes the last two volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu. The translation was made by C.K. Scott Moncrief (1889-1930), a contemporary of Proust and Proust’s original translator into English, as revised by Terence Kilmartin (1922-1991).
This edition is considered one of the best English translations of Proust. The Bibliotheque de la Pleiade collection represents academic excellence and the most significant contributions of French authors to world culture. Since Prime Minister Modi does not speak French, this edition comes with English subtitles.
(This story was not edited by the News18 staff and was published from a syndicated news agency feed – PTI)
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