Ethnographic Arms & Armour - View Single Post

Jim McDougall · 17th November 2011, 08:30 PM

I will say that I am greatly encouraged by Daves notes here, and that he has clearly used the search features here to obtain further detail on this weapon and the example he posted of his own. Most pleasing is that he has brought up the Kalash people of Chitral and as noted, wishes to learn more on this intriguing tribal people.

The reason I did not bring up the Kalash specifically in discussing Abdullatif's weapon, the subject of the thread, is because with the Afghan motif on the weapon it seemed more properly attributed to Nuristan, which as noted in my earlier post would suggest the regions of the Kafir designated denomination. Naturally the weapon form itself certainly would have diffused to the Chitral regions with the assimilation of the Kafirs back into thier ancestral Kalash tribes.
As I had mentioned in posts about two years ago, I had the pleasure of communicating with a tribal member of the Kalash situated here in the U.S. and active in preserving their tribal heritage. He would be most delighted to see this interest. I also had visited with a collector in Germany most interested in the Kalash, and who had gathered a good number of examples of these jamadhar katari's. Interestingly, many of these he had obtained in trips to Nepal. In E.Jaiwent Paul's "Arms and Armour: Traditional Wapons of India" (New Delhi, 1970, p.70) it is noted that these daggers are also attributed to regions in Nepal. We may presume that thier diffusion westward was via trade routes.

The association of these daggers to the chilanum is of course mostly of diffusional influence, and many forms of daggers and knives of India are produced in the manner of single piece forging, such as the bichwa along with the katar . The terminology, as indicated in the 1886 volume on Hobson Jobson on colloquial Anglo-Indian terms and phrases seems to support the Hindu origins of the 'jamadhar' term. As Pant explains (p.162-63) and as cited in the work of the British officer J. Shakespear, the term 'jam', yama=death; dhar =tooth, which are Hindi words. Inscriptions in Hindu using the phrase 'tooth of the god of death' in the term jamadhar support this, while there are of course Arabic and Persian words which are compellingly close in similarity. In Hindi, the term katar may be applied with 'to cut' or to 'knife' but there are 'to stab' or 'to pierce' suggestions.
Transliteration, semantics and colloquial expressions are the bane of the ethnographic weapons researcher, and many assumptions and misleading circumstances have led to what we know as 'collectors terms'. Trying to establish distinct identification and chronology of these weapons by term or etymology in contemporary narratives or colonial narratives can be a slippery slope at best. It is best to carefully qualify references and note accordingly in description.

17th November 2011, 08:30 PM	#23
Jim McDougall Arms Historian Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Route 66 Posts: 9,759	I will say that I am greatly encouraged by Daves notes here, and that he has clearly used the search features here to obtain further detail on this weapon and the example he posted of his own. Most pleasing is that he has brought up the Kalash people of Chitral and as noted, wishes to learn more on this intriguing tribal people. The reason I did not bring up the Kalash specifically in discussing Abdullatif's weapon, the subject of the thread, is because with the Afghan motif on the weapon it seemed more properly attributed to Nuristan, which as noted in my earlier post would suggest the regions of the Kafir designated denomination. Naturally the weapon form itself certainly would have diffused to the Chitral regions with the assimilation of the Kafirs back into thier ancestral Kalash tribes. As I had mentioned in posts about two years ago, I had the pleasure of communicating with a tribal member of the Kalash situated here in the U.S. and active in preserving their tribal heritage. He would be most delighted to see this interest. I also had visited with a collector in Germany most interested in the Kalash, and who had gathered a good number of examples of these jamadhar katari's. Interestingly, many of these he had obtained in trips to Nepal. In E.Jaiwent Paul's "Arms and Armour: Traditional Wapons of India" (New Delhi, 1970, p.70) it is noted that these daggers are also attributed to regions in Nepal. We may presume that thier diffusion westward was via trade routes. The association of these daggers to the chilanum is of course mostly of diffusional influence, and many forms of daggers and knives of India are produced in the manner of single piece forging, such as the bichwa along with the katar . The terminology, as indicated in the 1886 volume on Hobson Jobson on colloquial Anglo-Indian terms and phrases seems to support the Hindu origins of the 'jamadhar' term. As Pant explains (p.162-63) and as cited in the work of the British officer J. Shakespear, the term 'jam', yama=death; dhar =tooth, which are Hindi words. Inscriptions in Hindu using the phrase 'tooth of the god of death' in the term jamadhar support this, while there are of course Arabic and Persian words which are compellingly close in similarity. In Hindi, the term katar may be applied with 'to cut' or to 'knife' but there are 'to stab' or 'to pierce' suggestions. Transliteration, semantics and colloquial expressions are the bane of the ethnographic weapons researcher, and many assumptions and misleading circumstances have led to what we know as 'collectors terms'. Trying to establish distinct identification and chronology of these weapons by term or etymology in contemporary narratives or colonial narratives can be a slippery slope at best. It is best to carefully qualify references and note accordingly in description.