On the Use of Indian Terms for Identification of Weapon Types

[Mercenary]

Originally Posted by ariel

Sitting in the hotel ...

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".

[ariel]

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".

[ariel]

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

I think that closes the question.

[mahratt]

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?

[ariel]

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).

[mahratt]

Originally Posted by ariel

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).

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.

[Mercenary]

Originally Posted by Mercenary

This was examined six years ago

And published, of course.

[ariel]

Originally Posted by Mercenary

And published, of course.

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

[mahratt]

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!

[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.

[Mercenary]

Originally Posted by ariel

I found it: : Russian journal “ Studies of historical weapons” #1.

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.

[Mercenary]

Originally Posted by Mercenary

The third volume will be published in this year.

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.

[ariel]

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.

[Mercenary]

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.

[Mercenary]

Originally Posted by ariel

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.

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.