From Tanjore in south India came two emissaries of Sri Amblavana Desigar, head of a sannyasi order of Hindu ascetics. Sri Amblavana thought that Nehru, as first Indian head of a really Indian Government ought, like ancient Hindu kings, to receive the symbol of power and authority from Hindu holy men ... One sannyasi carried a sceptre of gold, five feet long, two inches thick. He sprinkled Nehru with holy water from Tanjore and drew a streak in sacred ash across Nehru's forehead. Then he wrapped Nehru in the pithambaram and handed him the golden sceptre. He also gave Nehru some cooked rice which had been offered that very morning to the dancing god Nataraja in south India, then flown by plane to Delhi.[4]
The event had negligible impact on public discourse at the time;[5][1] contemporaneous news clips recorded the gift of the Sengol as a courtesy.[2] Soon afterwards, the Sengol and other belongings of Nehru were donated to Allahabad Museum, where the sceptre was labelled "Golden Stick gifted to Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru".[6]
The Sengol remained largely forgotten until it was used in the inauguration of New Parliament House, New Delhi, in 2023.[5] At the inauguration, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was accompanied by Hindu priests heading the 20 Adheenams in Tamil Nadu, installed the Sengol near the chair of the Speaker of the Lok Sabha.[7][8][9] Simultaneously, the Government of India propagated a now-discredited narrative of the Sengol being a symbol of the transfer of power from the United Kingdom to India.[2]
Government claim
The narrative appears to have been derived from a year-old article by Swaminathan Gurumurthy, a Hindu nationalist, published in Thuglak magazine;[1][10] Gurumurthy attributed it to the recollections of Sri Chandrasekarendra Saraswathi, the 68th head of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, as told to a disciple in 1978.[1]
PM Modi receiving the Sengol from Hindu (Adheenam) priests in 2023
According to the Government, upon being asked by Lord Mountbatten about a symbol to mark the transfer of power, Nehru discussed the issue with his fellow Congress leader C. Rajagopalachari,[1][2] who informed Nehru of the Chola tradition of the transfer of the sengol and with his agreement, approached the seer of Thiruvaduthurai Adheenam Matha to make one.[1][2] A delegation of monks flew to Delhi to present this sengol first to Mountbatten and then to Nehru in an official ceremony.[1][2]
Design
Vummidi Bangaru Chetty, a jeweller from Madras (currently Chennai), crafted the Sengol.[11] The Sengol is a handcrafted, gold-plated sceptre about five feet (1.5 m) long, and has a diameter of about three inches (76 mm) at the top and one inch (25 mm) at the bottom. It encases a wooden staff and is surmounted by a sitting Nandi to symbolise justice and sturdiness.[11][12][3][13][14]
Reception
Barely a fortnight after Nehru received the Sengol, C. N. Annadurai, a Dravidian nationalist and the future first Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, wrote a polemical tract on the subject for Dravida Nadu, pondering the socio-political implications of his acceptance. He warned the motive of the Adheenam was to convince the public later they had inaugurated the new government.[15]
Many political analysts have noted the increasing use of Hindu grammar in the domains of the state. In 2023, The New York Times noted that this sceptre emerged as a key object encapsulating the meaning of the new Parliament, that is, "to shed not just the remnants of India's colonial past, but also increasingly to replace the secular governance that followed it".[16] Others found the use of a monarchical relic unsuitable for a parliamentary democracy.[17]
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