The Sengol

The Sengol (Tamil: செங்கோல்) is a gold-plated, silver sceptre that is installed in New Parliament House in New Delhi, India.^[1] The sceptre was originally gifted to Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, by a Tamil Adheenam in a religious ceremony on the evening before the Independence of India in 1947. The Sengol was housed at Allahabad Museum for seventy years until it was moved to its present location upon the building's inauguration by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2023.

As the Independence of India drew near, Jawaharlal Nehru and other members of the Indian National Congress (INC or Congress) took part in religious ceremonies and received gifts.^[2][3][1] On such an occasion on 14 August 1947, emissaries from the Thiruvaduthurai Adheenam Matha, a Hindu monastery in Tamil Nadu, presented Nehru with the Sengol at his home.^[3][1][2] According to a report in Time:

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]

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]

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]

These claims are dubious.^[2][1][5] There is no evidence either Mountbatten or Rajagopalachari was involved in the process, that the ceremony had any official significance, that Nehru perceived the event as a transfer of power, or that the delegation travelled by air.^[2][1][11] Facing criticism for lacking in facts, the Government published a collection of sources, ranging from monographs by academic historians to a blog that rejected its narrative, as evidence; they did not support any of the claims.^[12]

According to analysts, the 2023 episode with the Sengol was part of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) strategy to present itself as champions of Tamil culture.^[9] The party is aiming to gain electoral significance in South India through its Look South campaign.^[13][14][15] Soon after the Sengol's installation, Amit Shah, one of BJP's main strategists,^[16] asked Tamil voters to elect 25 BJP coalition legislators to Parliament as a show of gratitude.^[17]

Vummidi Bangaru Chetty, a jeweller from Chennai (then called Madras), crafted the Sengol.^[18] 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.^{[18][19][3][20][21]}

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.^[22]

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".^[23] Others found the use of a monarchical relic unsuitable for a parliamentary democracy.^[24]

• New Parliament House
• Ceremonial mace

• Media related to Sengol at Wikimedia Commons