Russian treasure

Why was Roerich - also known as Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh - selected for a national honour that might seem at odds with the others?

When Indira Gandhi’s government decided to honour a handful of artists as “national treasures” in the mid-1970s, her own proclivity towards Bengal and Santiniketan — where she had studied — could not be ignored. Six of the artists in the list of nine were from Bengal. A seventh, Raja Ravi Varma, arguably the most well-known among artists who changed the discourse around Indian art, was from the South but had a popular pan-Indian appeal. An eighth, and the only woman in the group — Amrita Sher-Gil — was half-Hungarian, but patriarchy and her own tendency to dress in saris helped