How an Armenian Preserved Indian Heritage

Armenians in Madhya Pradesh 

 Scindias had a phenomenally close relationship with Armenians; for 70 years, Armenian Colonel Jacob Petrus was the commander of Scindia’s army. Jacob also served the banker Maharani of Gwalior Baiza Bai Scindia. Colonel Jacob’s army consisted of about 40 Armenian officers. He was held in such high esteem by the Scindia that the whole city of Gwalior went into mourning at his death, and during the funeral, which was largely attended by the nobility and the military officers of the state, 95-minute guns, equal in number to the years of the veteran soldier, were fired from the ramparts of the historic Gwalior Fort.

 Called the “Armenian sorrow singer” by Hovhannes Tumanyan, Andranik, and others, Sarkis Kachadourian was born in the city of Malatia in Western Armenia. He studied at Karini Sanasaryan School, the Institute of Fine Arts in Rome, and the School of Decorative Arts in Paris. Surviving the horrors of the Armenian Genocide, he crossed the Transcaucasia and witnessed the tragedy of his mother nation, which became the main theme of his work. He was a member of the Union of Armenian Artists of Tiflis and the author of the first postage stamps of Soviet Armenia. The works of the first half of the 1920s are mostly devoted to the nature of Armenia, festivals, and emigration: “Ararat from Yerevan,”  “Migrant Women,”  “Distribution of Lunch,”  “Cotton Picking in the Ararat Valley,”  “Armenian Orphans in the Desert,”  “Armenian Refugees,” “Varaga Monastery Holiday,”  and “Sevana Island Churches.” His first attempt at reconstruction of fresco paintings was the reconstruction of old Persian frescoes, or rather their remnants, which exist in the ruined palaces of Ala Kapy Chehel Saloon in Isfahan. Then he focused on India. He had a one-man exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute in January of 1943, titled “Mural Paintings from the Cave Temples of India in Replica by Sarkis Katchadourian.” But before the Chicago exhibition, he had an exhibition of some of his paintings in Maharaja Scindia’s kingdom in India.

 An illustrated article written by Major G. L. Khirwadkar  on the contribution of Mr. Sarkis Kachadourian’s contribution to art was published in Scindia’s newspaper, Jayaji Pratap, which was the largest circulated newspaper in Central India then. Mr. Sarkis Kachadourian did a distinguished service to India in general and Scindia State in particular by discovering some very beautiful fresco paintings on the walls of the famous Buddhist caves at Bagh in Scindia State (Gwalior State).

 These frescoes comprise fascinating figures of Buddhas and Bodhisatvas and of men and women surrounded by garden scenery. They added very considerably to the existing reputation of the Bagh caves as a repository of early Indian art. Mr. Kachadourian spent two very busy months at Bagh making full-size copies of the wall paintings that were already known as well as those that had been newly discovered, and in spite of illness due to the unhealthy climate of the place, he completed his work with brilliant success. He brought these copies to Gwalior.

The original Adilshahi (a dynasty of kings in India’s Deccan region) frescoes were painted on the walls of the water pavilion at Kumatgi (District Bijapur) during the reigns of the Sultans of Bijapur in the 16th and 17th centuries. The paintings depicted the court life of Bijapur, and among them is a fine piece showing the game of polo as played at that time. The Gwalior exhibition of Mr. Kachadourian’s paintings had the privilege of exhibiting his Kumatgi frescoes for the first time, and the authorities of the Gwalior Museum of Maharaja Scindia had acquired this set of beautiful mural paintings for it.

The photos of Badami mural paintings as reproduced by Mr. Kachadourian were exhibited in the Gwalior exhibition in Scindia State and gave some idea of the beauty of the originals. Badami and Kumatgi frescoes were neglected, and Mr. Kachadourian was the first artist to attempt to reproduce and partially reconstruct them, thus bringing them to the attention of art lovers not only in India but all over the world. Badami and Kumatgi frescoes were painted in the 6th century, and thus, along with Ajanta and Bagh, they are representatives of Hindu art of that period. The frescoes were in bad condition, and we owe a great debt to Mr. Kachadourian for his great service to the Indian art of copying and preserving their previous works of art before time and climate have obliterated their last traces.

 As per Charles Faben Kelley, because “Mr. Sarkis Katchadourian, a gifted artist, was able to enter into the spirit of the Buddhist painters and spent four years in India working under difficult conditions to bring back a faithful record of their work, we can see for ourselves something of the grandeur of these little-known works. Those who are familiar with the original frescoes state that the fidelity of his work is extraordinary. Mr. Katchadourian was faced with a complex task: to find relatively undamaged portions of the paintings, to free them from surface dirt, and to estimate, in many cases, what the original colours must have been when time had been too savage in its erasures. The results are thrilling.”

Owing to the brittle nature of the rocks in which Bagh caves are situated, the mural paintings of inestimable value in these caves were gradually destroyed, despite the great care taken by the Archaeological Department of Gwalior under Scindias. Thanks to Mr. Sarkis Kachadourian, copies of these paintings were made, and the reproduction and reconstruction of these paintings by such a great artist as Mr. Kachadourian has been a very valuable addition to our art treasures.

  The great Armenian artist worked at Bagh, and the subjects of King Scindia saw the results of his work at one of the most important and representative centres of ancient Indian art. Mr. Kachadourian visited Ajanta, Padukoli, Badami, Kumatgi, and Bagh. His reproductions of the world-famous Ajanta mural paintings are acclaimed as masterpieces in this sphere. Select paintings of the Ajanta caves by Sarkis Kachadourian are now in the National Gallery of Armenia in Yerevan. Both the current President of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, Dr. Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, and the current Foreign Minister of India, Dr. S. Jaishankar, tweeted about the paintings they saw on their visits to Armenia, respectively.

 It is well known that culture and art are a very strong way for two nations to come together as friends, and Armenians and Indians need to use them more often. This author, in one of his articles, has mentioned that Armenian culture in India is not just limited to the erstwhile presidency cities of the British Raj years, which most people know, but even in the heart of India, in the region that we now call Madhya Pradesh, there were Armenians. India and Armenia are coming closer day by day because of our shared geopolitical interests. The author hopes that both nations will work more to strengthen people-to-people ties.