Nobody Sat Above the Salt

In a medieval hall, the table did the talking. The lord sat at the middle of a raised high table, and everyone else was placed by rank, all the way down to the salt. Sit above it and you mattered. Sit below it and you knew.

The historian Danièle Cybulskie notes that a modern wedding still seats its guests in much the same way. The top table never left.

The Row

The Sikh tradition arranges a meal the other way. Its word for it is pangat, from the Sanskrit pankti: a row. Diners traditionally sit on the ground, side by side, whatever their caste, creed, sex, age or standing. Guru Amar Das asked every visitor to eat in the row before he would see them. The saying that survives is pahile pangat, pachhe sangat: eat together first, then meet.

Sikh tradition holds that the Mughal emperor Akbar sat in that row too, among everyone else, before he was received by the Guru.

The practice continues. Britannica reports that the free kitchen at the Golden Temple in Amritsar feeds approximately 100,000 people a day, without regard to religion, race or caste.

The Line We Laid

For a hundred guests in Bengaluru, we wanted neither a throne nor a ranking. We wanted a row that could bend. So we joined round tables end to end into one long, curving line, a layout planners call a caterpillar, and set the whole dinner along it. In the line we laid, there was no dais and no table set apart.

Gold candelabra with tall white candles stand in the red velvet runner, beside a menu card on a black plate. Photo: The Taaffeite Lens, Taaffeite Events.

Down the middle ran a single length of red velvet, a river of love flowing between the guests, not around them. Gold candelabras stood in it. The light was low, and everyone was close.

At every place sat a menu card with a small photograph of the couple and their signature. Wherever you sat, they were with you.

A seat is a sentence. We wanted ours to say the same thing at every table.

A table cannot turn strangers into family. It can decide, before anyone sits down, whether anyone is placed above the salt.

Sources: Danièle Cybulskie, “Banquets in the Middle Ages,” Medievalists.net, 2023; “Pangat,” The Sikh Encyclopedia; Britannica, “Golden Temple.”