How to fix pagination in artificer index.php

Newbie making a mess..
Hi, I managed to make index.php to show prodcuts in artificer theme by copying parts of the archive-product.php to index..it work, it is showing products there but pagination fails ugly.

mysite.com/page/2 never works..

I tried brute mode by adding this to the end of index.php but still getting 404.

<?
global $wp_query;
$big = 999999999; // need an unlikely integer
echo paginate_links( array(
‘base’ => str_replace( $big, ‘%#%’, esc_url( get_pagenum_link( $big ) ) ),
‘format’ => ‘?paged=%#%’,
‘current’ => max( 1, get_query_var(‘paged’) ),
‘total’ => $wp_query->max_num_pages
) );
?>

my query is doing:

$paged = ( get_query_var( ‘paged’ ) ) ? get_query_var( ‘paged’ ) : 1;

$args = array(
‘post_type’ => ‘product’,
‘paged’ => $paged);

$wp_query = new WP_Query($args); ?>