On the Use of Indian Terms for Identification of Weapon Types

[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.