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French President Emmanuel Macron has gifted Prime Minister Narendra Modi a framed copy of a 1916 Paris giving flowers to a Sikh officer and an 11th-century Charlemagne chess replica, officials in Paris said.
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 works of French literature in the early twentieth 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 the “warrior peoples” of the north of the Indian subcontinent, like the Sikh soldiers who marched down the Champs-Elysées.
This photograph honors the Indian soldiers who fought in Europe on the side of France in 1914-1918, in the context of the many Indian battalions on parade on July 14, 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 got 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.
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