Choora-- Pesh Kabz-- Definition

[Berkley]

Thanks for the reference to the ch’huri [plural] item 380, which I had overlooked. From the description, these “three knives” appear to have little similarity to the Mahsud knife “like the Persian peshkabz” pictured and named “Choora” (without citation) by Stone as his Fig. 227. I had noticed the “ Ch’hura-kati” 483 “dagger”, but its provenance from Vizianagram in southeastern India seems pretty remote from the Khyber area. As Artzi noted in an earlier post: “distribution [of the choora] is limited to the areas around the borders of today’s Pakistan and Afghanistan.” I understood this knife to be the subject of the anecdote regarding the Englishman in “the Afghanistan area” and the Afghan (Farsi? Pashto? One of many others? ) word for “ emasculated”. It may well be that Hindi or other Indian languages contain a similar word, albeit with a somewhat different meaning.