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This royal throne of kings, this
In the Christian tradition, the heavenly throne comes insistently to mind for it is on it that God sits and sheds His grace; if you are part of the Islamic world, the takht-i marmar or marble seat of great Iranian emperors rises before the eyes; if, on the other hand, you know Russia, it might be the great ivory throne of Czar Ivan, the Terrible, that you think of, and if in England, then King Edward’s Chair in the Westminster Abbey. Pope has his grand throne, the Cathedra Petri, from which he speaks to countless Catholics all over the world but also the sedia gestatoria — the portable seat — in which he is taken out in procession on the shoulders of his followers; at the other end, the great Mughals had their masnad but also their takht-irawaan: the throne that moves. And, speaking of thrones who can possibly shake out from one’s memory accounts of the glitter of the fabulous takht-i ta'us — the Peacock Throne — which Shah Jahan got made and Nadir Shah took away less than a 100 years afterwards. Sometimes, you stagger on to the throne, according to the chronicles of man across all cultures, over all times, by wading through a river of gore, one remembers Kurosawa’s great film, Throne of Blood, inspired by Macbeth but, at other times, you also sit there in calm majesty, administering fairness and justice, as the great Vikramaditya did in the Indian tradition.There are clearly then, thrones and thrones, scattered, sometimes littered, all through human history.
Clearly, thrones took different shapes and were made of different materials, from marble to sandalwood, from gold to ivory. But ivory thrones were often the ones that were made with the greatest delicacy. Not many have survived the ravages of time, but occasionally, a part of a throne forces itself upon one's attention. Like the superb leg of the 13th century throne from Orissa, which is now in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington and images of which I reproduce here. Ordinarily ivory, taken from tusker elephants, is a material that one associates more with the south of India, or the North-East, but there was a time when the Kalinga region (modern Orissa) was teeming with elephants. Kautilya wrote in his Arthashastra about the elephants of Kalinga being the best of their type in the land, and one hears there of a king of the Ganga dynasty who styled himself as “nava navati sahasra kunjara-adhishwara” — ‘Lord of 99,000 elephants’. Evidently, then, Orissa was ivory-rich and the refined craft of ivory-carving flourished there. It is from that matrix of material and craftsmanship that this leg of an ivory throne comes. Interestingly, the leg — the only part that has survived from what must have been a magnificent throne — does not take the shape simply of a lion but of a composite animal of which the lion forms the lower part: a gajasimha, combining the forms of two great and powerful beasts, the elephant and the lion. There, the magnificent creature stands — an image of power and stateliness — embracing a whole craggy mountain between his powerful claws and protecting it, while a hapless warrior dangles from his powerful trunk. The carver evidently brings in the mountain form because of the technical necessity of making the rampant figure completely stable and solid, but then lets his imagination soar as it were. For, as if the mountain were a microcosm of the entire earth, he brings into it creatures of all description: a sleeping bull, an elephant looking over his shoulder, a parrot nibbling at a branch with its beak, a rodent emerging from a cave, even an ascetic crouching as if to seek refuge, chin resting on his knee. A series of rising, wave-like peaks bend in different directions, looking now like tendrils, now like the hoods of some unseen reptile. Everything, all creatures and all things, are under the shadow as it were of the great composite animal. Each of the other three legs of the throne must have looked something like this, and it is up to one’s imagination to reconstruct the whole throne. He who sat on it would have seldom looked at the carved legs that supported his seat but everyone who approached it would have received the message: there is power here, but also protection.
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THE moment you think of a throne, images of power and of authority rise to the mind. And associations keep rushing in. One knows that the word itself comes from Greek thronos, meaning, simply, ‘a seat; chair’, but it is not a simple seat or chair that one visualises. One thinks of majesty and grandeur, of a seat that is invested with power, from which authority flows, so to speak.
The favoured Sanskrit term for the throne, of course, is simhasana: ‘lion-seat’, in other words. The association of royal power with the lion is almost natural, the noble beast being a symbol of all-subduing majesty. One remembers that great Sanskrit classic, the Simhasana Dvitrimshika - Singhasan Battisi, in vernacular, filled with magical stories centred round the figure of Vikramaditya and his throne. But the Indian tradition apart, even in the Christian world, the greatest of royal seats on this earth — the Throne of Solomon — made of ivory and overlaid with the best of gold, featured lions: “The throne had six steps”, the Testament says, “and the top of the throne was round behind: and there were stays on either side on the place of the seat, and two lions stood beside the stays. And 12 lions stood there on the one side and on the other upon the six steps.”
