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Originally Posted by Battara
I was thinking that it was a marriage of an old blade with a new handle of glass, which seems smaller than it should be.
I do want to hear from the others.
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I beg to differ, while I might be wrong.
Indians have rather small hands and that reflects on the sizes of the hilts. I have several Indian daggers and some have unusually small hilts for Western hands (for example the majority of Indian Katars and Patah swords would be impossible to be used by westerners as their hands wouldn't fit the grip). However, they fit perfectly smaller hands, which I think it would be the case for this one.
Now with regards to glass vs. rock cristal, I believe it would be very difficult to distinguish them from the photos. However, rock crystal is neither very rare, nor very expensive (I have seen hundreds of huge crystals in a couple of shops in Brazil), so it might very well be rock crystal. Anyhow, this should be fairly easy to determine upon closer examination.
As with regards to the blade, I haven't seen any recent Indian blade chiseled with such skill and I suspect this is because it would be very time consuming and economically not efficient. I even tried to have such a blade made to order but I wasn't successful. Moreover, the pattern & contrast of the welded Damascus is not characteristic to the modern productions but to the earlier 20th century blades.