Beautifully formatted, illustrated and linked entry Ibrahim! and presents a fascinating array of considerations as we look more into these curious anomalies.
Before continuing I would like to address the intriguing but unfortunate title on this thread, which refers to the sword of the original post, and as I believe has been mentioned, has nothing to do with the 'shashka' type sabre. The term 'psuedo' as has been discussed is even more misplaced and seems has been tempting us 'down the garden path'.
The examples you have posted with the guardless character and similar features, most expressly the 'tunkou', offer keen insight into others which seem to fall into this spectrum, and appear to have southern India provenance.
I would suggest that this feature on the blade of the weapon of the OP, is not actually a tunkou at all, but more aligned with the decorative lobed palmette cuffs seen on many Deccani daggers, which extend in the manner of a langet over the blade root under the guard or base of hilt.
The shape of this hilt, seems primarily to align with the Mughal daggers, often of kard form, of the northern areas, and typically have the faceted bolster at the base of the grip and are guardless. These have the same lobed or flueret style cuff extending over the back of the blade across and in the same asymmetrical diagonal configuration basically as the 'tunkou' of earlier swords and many Chinese dao.
What is interesting in Tatyana's example posted, is that this feature exists below the faceted bolster, essentially an incongruent blend of 'north and south'! The faceted bolster of Persian and Central Asian Mughal north, and the palmette type cuff of Deccani south, hybridized with a rapier blade.
It is important here to note that the 'tunkou' or for that matter, even the palmette type cuff or langet Mughal items, much in the manner of the tunkou on yataghans or Ottoman weapons, seems to have had stylistic importance beyond any pragmatic purpose.
In many weapons, koftgari applications are added to blades in exactly the same shapes, decoration and location at the blade root or ricasso to vestigially represent this key feature. I recall a M1788 British cavalry sabre blade mounted on a Deccani tulwar (shamshir type hilt) which had this vestigial tunkou koftgari applied in exactly this manner.
The idea of rapier blades is not new to the southern regions in India, in fact such type blades are seen on early iconography. However, the use and popularizing of the European rapier blades seems to have become most notable during the British presence in the 18th c.
It is tempting to consider this may be an atavistic piece which follows the accord with the daggers of the north and in degree the south, using a blade repurposed to the rapier form in traditional interpretation.
With the other examples of these types, as Ibrahiim has well posted, there are great opportunities to examine the climate of their development. While the scrolled knuckleguard is well present in many hilts to the north, in some reading it does seem that Welch does consider this style to have moved to the north from southern origins (noted in 'Arms of the Muslim Knight' p.201).
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