Gairola Indian Art & Architecture Image Collection
C.K. Gairola was born in Dehradun during the rule of the British Raj. He completed an M.A. in history from Allahabad University, India, in 1946, and then completed a Ph.D. in Indian History and Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in 1949. He then studied Art History and completed a diplome de l'école (D.E.L.) at The École du Louvre, Paris, in 1953. He then served as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Munich by invitation of the Government of West Germany. Professor Gairola was working for the Embassy of India and the Indian Foreign Service as Press & Cultural Attache' in Switzerland when he met Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, who told him "the young nation needs people like you."
C.K. Gairola and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru,
first Prime Minister of independent India.
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During that time, he also worked as a journalist for the Hindustan Times,Week End Review, and Illustrated Weekly of India. While working with foreign dignitaries in London in 1962, he met the President of the Maharaja Sayajirao, University of Baroda, who invited him to become Chair of the Department of Art History. After marrying in Baroda and being blessed with a son, the family immigrated to the United States in 1967. He accepted a tenured professorship at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and soon after fraternal twins joined the family. He also held professorships at Kansas State University and the University of Washington, and he frequently lectured at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Hermitage Foundation, the University of Virginia, the Catholic University of America, and many other national and international institutions of higher learning.
Professor Gairola was a Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution on the National Mall, and an avid world traveler and polyglot who often led study tours to key art history/ archaeological sites on the Indian subcontinent. He made this slide collection for the classes he taught, during various trips to India and South Asia from the 1950s to 2000. Professor Gairola passed away in July 2003 in Washington, D.C.
About the Donor
C.K. Gairola and Indira Gairola
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The collection was gifted to University Libraries by Indira Bhojwani Gairola, C.K. Gairola's wife and a Senior Chemist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to meaningfully expand the learning and research environments for art history and archaeology scholarship at the University of Washington, where Gairola taught in 1970.
About the Database
This digital collection was researched and prepared by the UW Libraries Special Collections Division in 2011 with a grant from the Friends. Selection of 2500 digitized slides was done by Deepa Banerjee, South Asian Studies Librarian, and the research and descriptive data was prepared by Sarah Ganderup and Cherl Petso. The photographs were taken 1950-2000, with the bulk of the photos from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. The collection is a unique set of images that includes a significant representation of Indian art and architecture from the dynastic periods through the early 1960s, as well as art from Asia as a whole. The collection is organized by dynasty, location, and by century.
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