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Old 24th May 2020, 10:13 PM   #10
Nihl
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If I had to guess, as a collector that does focus mostly on Indian weapons, the reason for the inflated price on this katar actually does come from (as Drabant suggested) its tiger stripes. These stripes are famously associated with Tipu Sultan, an 18th century South Indian ruler that was known for being pretty much being the last source of Indian resistance (and indeed the last independent kingdom) in South India against British expansion. He was known for being quite fond of tigers, and as a result had tiger faces and stripes and all sorts of tiger-related imagery on his possessions. For ease of reference a blunderbuss that is known to have been owned by him is attached. The problem with this is that, given his prominence in Indian history, his name and things representative of him (i.e. the tiger stripes) are then frequently attached to things in order to increase their worth, often quite dubiously as it is next to impossible to tell if a weapon was really owned by him or not. As a result, there are several "swords of Tipu Sultan", as well as guns and other such things that all have tigers featured on them in some way (attached is one such sword with very obvious tiger imagery). An example of clearly fraudulent attribution can be seen on Faganarms, where they justified selling a sword with a (relatively) roughly cast and decorated brass hilt for over $3,000 on the basis that it had a tiger-head pommel and "stripes" going down the handle (see https://www.faganarms.com/products/a...of-tipu-sultan, though a picture of the hilt is also attached). Though this katar is way more likely to have been owned by Tipu, it is at the same time entirely possible (I would argue, anyways,) that the koftgari artist that decorated it was simply a fan of waves.
Regardless though it certainly is quite a fine katar.

Additional factors would be the remarkably good condition the katar is in, given (specifically) how the koftgari decoration appears to have very few damages to it. There's also the fact that plenty of collectors/dealers see these items solely as art pieces, and as a result feel justified in spending exorbitant amounts of money on them in general (and an item with the "provenance" of being sold for so much means that it can be sold again - for the same price or higher - later on, should its owner ever need the money).
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