The above Ornamental Ivory Pendant was beautifully handcut and turned in Rajasthan in the early 1900s in one of the princely houses of Jaipur or Udaipur or Jodhpur. Difficult to conjecture on exactly what was its purpose, but it would definitely have been but a component of something larger, indeed could have originally been, for example, but one of a dozen such Ornamental Ivory carvings decorating the back of a chair, or part of the decoration of a baby’s crib.
Along with umpteen other such items deemed superfluous by the shoots of the princely families -after a newly-formed national government, ushered in through the Partition of India and the end of the British Raj, moved to curtail their power and privilege- such as