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Originally Posted by Tatyana Dianova
Thank you Roland for your opinion! I am not an expert, but I have taken a look at Cuirassier sword blades and an earlier 17-18 century European blades, and the Firangi blade looks more similar to earlier blades. It is also relatively thin, lightly flexible and well balanced, unlike the Indian made blades. The blade is not laminated - I have put a Renaissance wax with a cloth to it. I was never able to melt the wax with a hair drier as advised to make it transparent and uniform.
Jens, thank you for your interest. I have made extra pictures of the handle. It is heavily silver plated. I guess it is South Indian or Deccani from 18th century or earlier?
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I have seen many Firangis, and I even handled a Firangi almost like this one. From the looks of it this might not be a Deccan sword because a lot of basket hilt swords have Maratha style hilts, but this hilt doesn’t look lik the typical south Indian hilt. This sword might be of North Indian origin also because remeber Firangis, even those without Koftgari, were seen as luxury items by Indian nobles. Just lik European shoes, European blades of good quality were rare and nobles who got their hands on them tried their best to show off.