Some of the hilts can with some certainty be pointed to a specific place, but it is not easy and the uncertainty is quite big.
We know that they at Bikaner made hilts for export to other parts of India, but we dont know of it was the same hilt type they made, or if they made the hilts according to the fashion at the place where it was supposed to be sold.

You are right. It would be very interesting if we can know the place of origin or the fashion at the place. But it doesn't make any sense taking into account the degree of mobility of the population of North and Central India in 18-19th.
If only local court fashion...

Not touching why in India some kind of steel was called phauladi (from "phul-" - flower) I can now confidently conclude that "phul-katara" is definitely simply a bunch of gems that was attached to a string which fastened a dagger on a waist belt :)

The same tradition was in Persia (John Chardin, Travelling to Persia, 1811) as "Rose of Dagger" and the words in Jahangir-name in Urdu have the same meaning. In Persian one I will check and let you know.

Jamdhars with phul-katara:

Thanks a lot for such intolerant communication with me in this topic. Because of this I got to the end of researching in this not very important for me field.

Iranian and Mughal phul-katara:

Taking into account that the above assertion comes from Pant who was citing Chardin, and who prefaced this statement with words " obscure" and "perhaps", the confidence of the above author seems a bit excessive:-)))))

(( this very topic, post #98))

It is very nice that in the end you always agree with me in any subject. If still in the middle of the debate you (and not only you) would be more patient we could all learn more. In any case I found out a lot of interesting things from the time of Jahangir and Shah-Jahan so it will be very good article I hope.

We seem to have heard multiple brilliant, conclusive and mutually-exclusive theories of the origin of "Phul kattara".

Among them a homophony of Hindi "Ful" and Persian " Phulad", allusion to the dried leaves/flowers added to the crucible for wootz manufacture, pommels with flowery figures, gem- studded katars, strings of brilliants attached to daggers etc, etc.


Perhaps, the truth is much simpler than that.

Flower(y) in a sense of flamboyant? Lavishly decorated?

( My free contribution to your future article)

Many thanks. It was not in Pant's book. It was the note of a translator in one of translations of the Jahangirnama. Unfortunately, in another later translation, the translator clearly wrote that "phul-katara" is a pommel in the shape of a flower. A misconception took the beginning from there ((

In this topic you could observe the usual process of study of any problem. When the wrong versions are gradually discarding and only one are retaining in the end. Usually this process is hidden from prying eyes. But in this case you were lucky enough to witness this firsthand. It was the real research. I am very grateful to all the participants of this discussion.

Never have conducted any research project myself and never have witnessed it being done by an accomplished and world - renown researcher, I feel truly privileged to be given an opportunity to participate in your Master Class. I was awed by your virtuosity with languages, your fountains of ideas, and your ability to copy Internet pictures.
Certainly, your paper will make a tremendous splash!

PNAS?

I think the splash will be much greater than that of the "fallen coin" ... It's nice that it is understood :)

Why only my master class? There were also Jim, Jens and others - all who really tried to understand.

Actually we are all in the same class.....here we learn together!!! :)
Mercenary, looking forward to your paper and hope you will keep us apprised. I congratulate anyone and everyone who puts 'pen to paper' and admire them wholeheartedly. It takes courage and stamina to publish .
It has been a most enlightening discussion.

Thanks a lot, Jim. The most difficult for the researcher is to admit own mistakes. I had been wrong the most part of this debate, but I was able to admit it publicly. Not everyone can do as well. You pointed to my mistakes and I appreciate it. I hope the most part of topics on the forum will be lead to new knowledge and the truth.

I do too Mercenary!!! I very much appreciate the reply, and your courtesy as well as the courage to admit misperceptions or mistakes is exemplary.
Our learning here of course often extends beyond knowledge itself.

'The most difficult for the researcher is to admit own mistakes.'

No, not really, you just admit them. I have done it, and I will continue to do so. When you write something, it is with the knowledge you have at the moment, but maybe you later find out that it was wrong - so why not admit it? If we admit that we are all in a learnig session, these things will happen - even if some of the members are on a higher level than others, and that it is the members on a higher level, that are the most to make misrtakes - due to the level.

However, whichever level one is on, it should not leed to sarchasme towards other members, whichever level they are on.

Phul-katara
 

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.

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.

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".

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".

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

I think that closes the question.

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?

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).

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.

And published, of course.

Ariel,
I deliberately didn't quote your post. You are not the only one discussing this topic on this forum. So don't assume that I'm talking to you.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

And all these articles will be written by the very same type of people you are describing in your previous post :-)))
All soft sciences have a good percentage of their results, discussions and conclusions based on personal prejudices, fantasies and wishful thinking. They also employ highfalutin’ words, convoluted sentences and manipulative arguments.
They are incapable of dissociating from personal tastes and ambitions and cannot employ the main scientific instrument,- the experiment. All historical sciences in the best possible case have at their disposal a bunch of quotations from the sources of unknown veracity and objects of uncertain age, origin and significance. Two different academically-minded individuals will easily produce three mutually exclusive conclusions .
In a way, they are akin to psychiatry, the last frontier of medicine. Having very limited sources of objective information, they rely on the external appearance and subjective “complaints” : how can we be certain, for example, that a patient suffers from borderline personality and not from bipolar illness? Psychiatric DSM, already in its 5th reincarnation, is a classic example of “glossary” with constantly changing subjective diagnostic criteria of diagnoses.

Egerton was the first one to compile a glossary. But he was in India for a short time and only in a small part of it. He knew absolutely nothing of anything outside its NW region, of the influence of, say, South on Deccan, of Deccan on NW and vice versa, the rest of Indian history and ad infinitum. He was simply the first, and as such poorly informed.

Stone was the next, and his Glossary is still a tremendously important but not perfect educational instrument.

Elgood stand heads and shoulders above them. His glossaries were researched to the hilt, but he repeatedly reminds the readers that much is not known yet.

Still, all three are perfect examples of earnest and honest attempts to systematize our knowledge. Their input was and is priceless. So, the word “ glossary” should not be viewed with derision and sarcasm.

All my objections to the soft side of “ weaponology” address ignorant and self-adoring publications, from articles and books , pretending to be called “ research” , resorting to omission or fabrication of what is already known, in short ,- ignorance married to deception.

I have nothing against color albums: they are better than black and white:-)

But if one wants to be engaged in real science, let him become a chemist, a physicist, a molecular biologist or an engineer. Science is a full time job. Otherwise, one should keep study of ancient weapons as a hobby and do not pretend to be a specialist. That is what I do and am happy about having a relaxing “vacation” from real science that demands from me brutal objectivity and is by definition falsifiable:-) One may be permitted to assemble examples and advance hypotheses for their potential use by the professionals. These publications may be accepted and cited, or conversely , ignored, critiqued or thrown into the garbage pile by the true knowledgeable and dedicated researchers.

Linguistics is an exact science. History is also an exact science, if historians do it, and not politicians or populists. Ethnography is generally reality itself. These three sciences are essential in the study of traditional weapons especially oriental ones.
All sciences are exact sciences if they are practiced by professionals. If physics, chemistry or molecular biology will be dealt with by art historians and other connoisseurs of beauty (or dealers in chemical reagents, synchrophasotrons or microscopes trade), then these sciences will immediately cease to be exact sciences.

"The Indian Sword" by Philip Rawson is the only book in the field of Indian weapons research that can be called a scientific work.

Rawson has my respect: his book was the first one dedicated specifically to Indian arms.
But to call his book “…the only ….scientific work…” is rather funny. Rawson was never interested in arms history. This book was an assignment given to him to describe the collection of the V&A Museum. He never ventured outside of it and was not even certain whether other similar collections existed elsewhere, India not even mentioned. As a result, he assigned names to different objects simply by their percent-wise representation of labels on which they were listed in the V&A archives. He was lumping mechanical damascus and wootz together: Fig.6: “ watered mechanical damascus of the Kirk Narduban pattern”, pp. 19-20 describing 4 patterns of Persian damascus: Kirk Narduban, Bidr or Qum, Begami and Sham, all of which were allegedly produced by a “method of mechanical damascus/ pattern welding” etc, etc, etc. His bibliography list doesn’t even mention books by Buttin and Stone. In short, while sorely needed in the 1960’s as the “first”, this book outlived its purpose because of not being “right”.

Having finished his assignment, Rawson published nothing more in the arms history field, concentrating instead on Oriental erotic art. The only conceivable connection between them is his repeated mention of the “ phallic energy” of Indian swords:-)

That is why swords and any other weapons are used in puja ceremony. The "phallic energy" - this is in short form for Europeans, so as not to explain for a long time. By the way, I'm going to explain this in detail soon. In Russian, of course.

In your future paper you might want to discuss sword positions on the altar: edge down on the altar might indeed signify phallic energy. But according to what is shown on the pic you posted ( the sides of the tulwar blade lying flat on the altar) male Hindu believers had Peyronie’s disease .
Feel free not acknowledging my contribution to your paper.