[Jim McDougall]

The terms used for swords have long presented an ever running conundrum that we as students of arms have described as 'the name game'. Much of this derives from the terms used by collectors to describe their items, but which have filtered into the lexicon of words used by arms writers in the books used as references by legions of collectors, students and of course other writers.

Philip Rawson tried to categorize these weapons in "The Indian Sword" in 1967, and brought forth the terms used by Egerton, Walhouse and other writers earlier, however his focus was mostly on blades. It by then had become apparent that 'tulwar' was primarily a term for sword in general in Indian parlance, but typically seemed only applied to the Indo-Persian hilt we know so well. Rawson seems to have well realized the complexity and treacherous aspects of trying to use hilts in classification. In India, the descriptive word most commonly used for sword was tulwar. In reading literature and accounts of the British Raj, the swords used by Indian cavalry which were often three bar guard European style cavalry sabres, were often called 'tulwar'.

As Marius has pointed out and well shown, these familiar hilts are mounted on many other 'forms' of blades in the Subcontinent which by the blade type become other classifications such as tegha; sukhela (as with Robert's); and others. With these, their classification succumbs to whatever term the blade is called by. This becomes problematic for example with the 'sosun-patta' in which case if the hilt is tulwar, it is a Mughal type, while if it has a khanda hilt ('Hindu basket hilt) it is a Hindu type. So then if a sword is called sosun patta, why are the hilts different on various examples? In most cases, the describer relents and terms it either Mughal sosun patta or Hindu sosun patta, using the means most dreaded by most collectors, 'qualification'. Most collectors want to call a weapon by a single word or term, but such laconic classification is not always possible in the constant variation and combining of forms and elements.

In 1980. G.N.Pant in his work "Indian Arms & Armour", desperately tried to resolve many of these ongoing classification conflicts with both swords and daggers by focusing his typology on hilts, and throughout his text describes 'errors' by both Egerton and Rawson.
His work has become a landmark reference as a benchmark for the classification of Indian weapons, however with the caveat that many of the categorization of hilts, particularly 'tulwars', were arbitrary and without sufficient foundation for regional or dynastic applications.

In the study of swords, a number of writers have well noted that with the ever present phenomenon of blades transcending geographic and cultural boundaries through trade, colonization, conquest and occupation, and other events, it is best to remember that hilts are locally or categorically applied to these blades. This is in whatever form or style preferred.

This maelstrom of terminology used to describe swords and edged weapons has been long compounded by transliteration, semantics, colloquialisms, metaphoric nicknames and often of course all of these perpetuated by later writers where these terms become imbedded in the vocabulary.
A good example of this is the Indian dagger we now know as 'katar' which is actually termed 'jamadhar' in India. It was Egerton who accidentally transcribed the term in 1884 in his venerable work, where the term was used by other writers, and is now hopelessly imbedded as 'katar' in the language of collectors.