Hunting Tulwar (Tulwar Shikargah)

[Nihl]

Originally Posted by Jim McDougall

"... subsequently applied commercially, quite wrongly, to 19th century decorative swords with chiselled animals down the length of the blade,also referred to as shamshir shikargah."

Hi all! Just popping in again to give what info I can here. First of all, in my opinion as someone who mainly studies indian arms, I believe this quote from Elgood (that I have quoted above from Jim's post) is the most important thing to keep in mind here. That is to say that, principally, these aren't hunting swords, or swords with some deep hunting-related symbolism behind them, but rather just swords that happen to have hunting scenes carved into the blades. Most of them were made simply as high quality tourist pieces, and indeed most seem to have succeeded to this point - even to this day westerners seem to get consistently ensnared by the concept that these swords were of deep importance, commensurate with the intensity of their carvings.

My intention here being not to tear down or disregard how cool or impressive the amount of detail in some of these swords can be, but rather just a message of warning not to conflate ultimately vapid tourist bait with those decorations that have legitimate spiritual/religious significance (ok I'll admit calling these swords "vapid" is a bit harsh, but I hope that you all get what I mean ).

Anyways, onto some new-ish information for this discussion, I'd like to point out some linguistic info. As the phrase "shamshir shikargar(h)" would imply, this phrase is likely of a persian or heavily persian-influenced origin (what with the use of the term shamshir as opposed to tulwar). Of note, however, is that even in modern hindi, the term "shikar" is most often used to refer to the action of hunting or a hunter, with "shikargar" indeed likely being an older/archaic term for the latter. The modern term in hindi for a hunter, meanwhile, is funnily enough even more persianized; "shikari". The "i" at the end serving the same purpose as the i in say, afghani, iraqi, punjabi, etc., i.e. designating that something is of/comes from that place. In the case of "shikari", this would mean they are a "person of the hunt", literally speaking. I would be willing to guess this is what the "gar(h)" at the end of "shikargar(h)" means as well.

One possible explanation for this relates to the root of the verb "to do" in hindi being "kar", which could potentially be misheard and colonially transliterated as "gar" instead, especially when spoken quickly by a native speaker (someone saying something along the lines of "(this is a) shamshir shikar kar" - a shamishir that one is to hunt with). This is also why I prefer using the spelling of "shikargar", as I feel "shikargah" is phonetically too vague and, likely, is the result of someone mishearing the last consonant of the original term.

Finally, however, I will note that all of this linguistics talk is pure speculation and conjecture. I am, compared to an actual, professional linguist, purely a "linguistic dilettante" of sorts, and though I find the area fascinating I am not at all fluent in Hindi or any other south asian language. Rather, all of this is built off of the 1 and a half years of hindi that I took while at university .