On the Use of Indian Terms for Identification of Weapon Types

[Jens Nordlunde]

I just found something about the Phul-dagger, or in this case a Phul-katar.
Wheeler M. Thackston: The Jahangirnama, Oxford University Press, 1999. page 469.
'Phul-katara..........phul means 'flower' and refers to ornate jewel-inlay work on the hilt, phul-kataras were mainly ornamental presentation items while ordinary kataras were used as weapons'.

By especially mentening jewel-inlay work, must mean that the author does not regard katars with chiselled/inlaid/koftgari floral decoration to this group.

[ariel]

Sitting in the hotel in Atlanta, waiting for a symposium that starts in 3 hours, re-reading old comments…..
Re. Posts 2,4, 29,123:

Ful-kattara is repeatedly snown in Hales ( and, I think, Elgood, but the books are far away from me at the moment) and designates a “flowery dagger”, i.e. just a dagger with a pommel depicting stone-carved bunch of flowers. No firm connection to wootz, jewels, carved blades etc.

[Mercenary]

Originally Posted by ariel

Sitting in the hotel ...

I'm sorry, but no chance. This was examined six years ago from the text of Jahangir-name (in Persian of course) and compared with illustrations depicting specific scenes. Almost all types of daggers and court gifts have been identified. Including the "phul katara", "khapwa" and even the "royal Mazendaran dagger".

[ariel]

Well, further arguments seem to be pointless. At the end of the day, we are obligated to accept the interpretations advanced by professional researchers of Indian weapons well versed in Indian and Persian linguistics and with vast and long experience in that field.

I shall take Hales, Elgood and Jens Nordlunde any moment.

Of course, other people have a right to stick to their guns and advance novel revolutionary interpretations.

But, as my former mentor taught me, the rule #1 of any research is "It is nice to be the "first", but what really counts is to be right".

[ariel]

I am back home.
Please see Elgood’s Jaipur book, #35-38.

I think that closes the question.

[mahratt]

The book of the highly respected Robert Elgood "Arms & Armor: At the Jaipur Court, The Royal Collection", if I'm not mistaken, became available to a wide range of readers in 2016?
Did the Mercenary start this thread in 2015?

[ariel]

Mahratt,
I am purposefully not commenting on your posts. Please do not comment on mine.
Just as an aside, the last communication from Mercenary was posted yesterday, 7 years after the publication of the Jaipur book (2015).

[Mercenary]

Originally Posted by Mercenary

This was examined six years ago

And published, of course.

[ariel]

Originally Posted by Mercenary

And published, of course.

Can you provide its link, please?
Even better, the pdf?

[mahratt]

Can anyone tell me where the PDF of Robert Elgood's book "Arms & Armour: At the Jaipur Court the Royal Collection" is posted on the Internet? Thanks in advance!

[ariel]

Originally Posted by Mercenary

And published, of course.

I found it: : Russian journal “ Studies of historical weapons” #1.

The current confusing state of classifications, attributions, dating and definitions of old Indian weapons is firmly blamed on the “ eurocentric” approach of virtually all previous researchers. And I fully agree.
However, this is not an example of a malicious “ cultural imperialism”. This is just a reflection of an almost total absence of systematic research of the field by local authors . Europeans had to start from scratch and with very limited knowledge of the field.
With the exception of superficial and confusing reporting ( “ Ain al -akbari” , “ Nujum -al -ulum”) there are no systematic contemporaneous manuscripts dedicated to Indian weapons written by local authors. It fell to the Europeans ( mostly British) to “discover” Indian weapons and in a traditional European fashion trying to make sense out of their bewildering variety. This led not only to physical descriptions but to the names. Is it talwar or tulwar? The former is likely to be more correct, but the latter utilizes English grammatical rule of the “ u” in a closed syllable pronounced as “a(h)” , see “ mast” and “must”. Afghanis had a short sword called “ selavah” with ( often) a recurved blade, but the Brits transcribed the former as “salawar” and added familiar to them Yataghan to the confusing name. To simplify that name for the unwashed masses, a “Khyber knife” was born. One can continue ad infinitum. Pant’s 3 volume book is by and large a copy-and -paste from Rawson, Egerton and Stone. Perhaps the best book on Indian weapons written by a native Indian is a recent one by Dr. Ravinder Reddy, a psychiatrist and collector living in San Diego.

This is not peculiar to India. With the exception of Japan, Indonesia and (perhaps) Philippines there were no systematic studies of any other Oriental weapons ( please correct me if I am wrong).

In 1950’s Iranians invited a professor from the USSR ( his name escapes me for the moment) to catalogue weapons from their museums. Unfortunately, he died soon thereafter and the later book by Khorasani also copypastes whole paragraphs from other sources.

The Topkapi collection was catalogued only in 1928-9 by a German Hans Stocklein. In the 1960-80’s Unsal Ucel went back to the original collection and found inscriptions since removed by crude polishing , gems and gold mysteriously disappearing etc.

Sorry to sound “eurocentric”, but without European tradition of museum maintenance we would still be in the total darkness. We know infinitely more about old European weapons than the Oriental ones because of meticulous written records in private collections and multiple museums as well as from a multitude of books , Oakeshott being just one example.

[Mercenary]

Originally Posted by ariel

I found it: : Russian journal “ Studies of historical weapons” #1.

No. It was published as
Kurochkin A.Ju., Malozemova E.I. "Royal" daggers of Jahangir. HISTORICAL ARMS AND ARMOUR IN MUSEUM AND PRIVATE COLLECTIONS, v. 1, pp. 67-88. Moscow. The Moscow Kremlin Museums Publ., 2018. 352 p. in Russian.

(Курочкин А.Ю., Малоземова Е.И. «Царские» кинжалы Джахангира // Историческое оружие в музейных и частных собраниях. Выпуск 1. 67-88. Москва: ММК, 2018. 352 с.)

Sorry, I couldn't find the PDF file online. I don't even have that edition on hand right now. But it's not a problem to buy books of this series in Russia. The third volume will be published in this year.

[Mercenary]

Originally Posted by Mercenary

The third volume will be published in this year.

Maybe it will be interesting. In the second issue there is an article about the talwar and its handle: when and where did it arised and what does the word "talwar" mean. In the third issue there should be an article about when, where and why straight karud-peshkab acquired a double bend. In Russian of course.

[Mercenary]

Originally Posted by ariel

Sorry to sound “eurocentric”, but without European tradition of museum maintenance we would still be in the total darkness. We know infinitely more about old European weapons than the Oriental ones because of meticulous written records in private collections and multiple museums as well as from a multitude of books , Oakeshott being just one example.

Description of museum collections and the museum work in whole is only a small part of the science of weapons.

You are right, there was confusion with the terminology of Indian weapons and this was historically determined. But that's in the past. The problem is that this continues even now and is exacerbated by the appearance of non-scientific glossaries built randomly.

The fact is, and this is also due to historical reasons, that the study of weapons folded as a description of collections and it was (and is) not a science, but a service and an entertainment for collectors and dealers. The purpose of science is the search for truth. The goal of the dealer is to sell you as much as possible. This requires colorful descriptions and a lot of different muddy information. It warms up the market. That is why a lot of colorful albums were published instead of academic research.

The next problem is that the weapons were studied by art historians instead of real historians . Any mafia in the field of any art consists of a band of a collector, a dealer and an art historian. As a result of such “research”, we can see the appearance of strange objects at auctions, and then on the basis of these chimeras, after their legitimizing, we can see the appearance of entire groups of similar items.

Until the study of weapons is built on the principles of scientific research, we will forever be discussing here strange items from the next auction, or why in the next colorful album the same items are called differently, and different items are called by the same names.

[ariel]

Originally Posted by Jens Nordlunde

I just found something about the Phul-dagger, or in this case a Phul-katar.
Wheeler M. Thackston: The Jahangirnama, Oxford University Press, 1999. page 469.
'Phul-katara..........phul means 'flower' and refers to ornate jewel-inlay work on the hilt, phul-kataras were mainly ornamental presentation items while ordinary kataras were used as weapons'.

By especially mentening jewel-inlay work, must mean that the author does not regard katars with chiselled/inlaid/koftgari floral decoration to this group.

As I have mentioned before, research in antique Oriental weapons requires expertise in two unrelated fields: weapons per se and thorough knowledge of languages in question.

Thackston is a well known and highly respected authority on Arabic and Persian languages as well on several other languages pertaining to the Islamic cultures.
However, he will be the first to admit that weapons as such do not fall into his area of expertise.

Elgood is by far the best current authority on Arab and Indo-Persian weapons. But he is very open about his insufficient level of linguistic expertise. Having recognised this shortcoming, he spent many years working shoulder to shoulder with professional Indian and Persian linguists.

This is why I put my trust in his conclusions.

And I fully agree with Jens: research is a risky business and wrong turns are inevitable. That is exactly why good professional researchers are very careful about their final conclusions, scour the literature and perform many control studies aimed at overturning their initial hypothesis. Only if the latter fail to negate their earlier results do they publish the final paper with conclusions. And if some colleague later on finds a way to disprove their conclusions, they freely admit it bruised egos notwithstanding.