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, 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 Silver items by the hundred-weights, and fantastic hand-carved wooden artefacts, the above sensuously worked Ivory piece found its way to Delhi. The Silver-work transforming it into a quite beautiful pendant was done in the 1970s, in Pahar Ganj, New Delhi.
The elephant was never in India killed for its tusks, for not only is the elephant in India far too valuable as a beast of burden, the elephant is also the earthly guise of Ganesh, one of the most beloved and widely worshipped of the pantheon of Indian deities.