Why is Surya the only god in the Brahmanic pantheon to wear high boots?

It was the boots that intrigued me.

Meandering through the Government Museum in Mathura in sandals befitting the hot summer afternoon, I was almost irrationally bothered by the sight of so much close-toed footwear on the sculptures of the Hindu sun god Surya.

In one bronze rendering, a nimbate Surya sits between two hierarchically-scaled little horses, a dagger between his booted feet, in another sandstone composition, he stands holding a lotus in each hand, flanked by his attendants, and in yet another stone tableau, he appears to rest on his haunches as he is chauffeured in a seven-steed chariot. Notwithstanding the range of his poses, whether in the early centuries of the Common Era or the tenth, Surya was always shod.

In the Brahmanic pantheon of the first millennium CE, Surya is the only deity who wears shoes. As art historian Pratapaditya Pal writes in the first volume of his Indian Sculpture: Circa 500 B.C.-A.D. 700 (1986), Surya is “...a regal figure like Vishnu but usually with two arms. The lotus is his distinctive emblem, which he holds with both hands. He is further distinguished only in northern India by his jacket or coat of mail, trousers and boots, generally the attire of the inhabitants of northwestern India...

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