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Originally Posted by Jens Nordlunde
Glad you agree Ariel :-)
Tod, vol. II page 158. “The Bikaneris work well in iron, and have shops in the capital and in all the larger towns for the manufacture of sword blades, matchlocks, daggers, iron lances, etc. The sword-handles, which are often inlaid with variegated steel, or burnished, are in high request, and exported to various parts of India.”
Having read this one start to wonder, if the hilts were made in the fashion of Bikaner hilts (whatever that was), or if they adjusted the hilt form in the fashion to the place where they were supposed to be sold?
From what Tod writes they must have had quite a big production, but we must not forget, that Bikaner was pased by a lot of caravans going in all directions.
From Robert Elgood and others, we know that weapons were made at a lot of places, and likely exported, like the ones from Bikaner, to other parts of India.
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Tod got his materials on Bikaner at the end of 18 - beginning of 19 century. However, ~150 years earlier the entire armoury of Adoni was transferred to Bikaner.
God only knows how the Adoni examples influenced the Rajastani ones. But likely the Bikaner hilts ( whether reflecting pure Rajastani tradition, evolving from the southern one, or any other combination of ethnic inventiveness) that were "... exported to various parts of India" pollinated so many other places, that it might be impossible at the end to separate flies from hamburgers ( a delightful Russian saying). I bet that some of those patterns eventually got new and specific names based on distant localities. Everybody likes to be a source of something unique and patriotic. Perhaps that is why we have so many different hilt patterns:-)
I remember Jonathan Barrett's talk in Timonium in which he ruefully admitted that , perhaps, only Udaipuri hilts have a chance to be firmly attributed.