The Sengol and politics
As someone who started his schooling a couple of months before India gained Independence, I consider myself as a child of the dawn of Independence. I studied in the Tamil medium first and though I switched over to the English medium thereafter till the end of my school years, Tamil continued to be my first language (though it was not my mother tongue). I was fortunate to have been taught by some of the finest scholars in Tamil literature and poetry. Yet, I never came across an instance where the term ‘Sengol’ was used to signify the transfer of power. I recollect that the term was used along with the Tamil word for rule or governance — “Aatchi”, as in “Sengol Aatchi”, or its opposite “Kodungol Aatchi”, signifying whether a king or monarch was just and benevolent or unjust and cruel, respectively. Therefore, I find the excitement now about Sengol being a sacred symbol of the transfer of power to be rather befuddling and amusing.
As someone interested in history, I do not recall that throughout the 3,000 years and more of recorded history of the subcontinent, power was necessarily transferred through a Sengol or its regional variants like dharmdhand, etc. More often than not, the transfer of power was achieved by conquest and waging war or by violent elimination of the incumbent ruler.
