Jens, Jim and others:
When considering monuments and other statuary, we should remember also the mausoleums that have survived to this day in remote parts of the Rajput territories. These proud and determined warriors had to endure repeated invasions and often retreated to the less fertile and less desirable parts of NW India to build their strongholds.
I have a colleague and friend who is a Rajput prince and can trace his family line back to the 10th C CE. The family still occupy the ancestral palace in Gujarat, as well as a former palace (now largely in ruins) dating from the 14th C CE. In the same town as the older palace is the family crematorium which features perhaps a hundred stone memorials to family nobility dating back to the 14th C. The men are always depicted as warriors on horseback with lances, curved swords, a small shield/buckler, and sometimes a bow with a quiver of arrows.
The monuments date from the 14th C to about the end of the 17th or early 18th C. Some of them are too badly worn to get an accurate depiction of the weapons they used, but others show these in clear detail. I have found only one example of a katar depicted on these monuments (see third example below). Based on the weaponry used by the leaders of this Rajput clan, I would say the katar was first used by them probably no earlier than the 16th C CE.
Similar mausoleums likely exist for other Rajput clans, and the information could be obtained from some field research in Gujurat and Rajastan. It's a matter of knowing where to look and who to contact. This is one of those things that's on my bucket list to do.
In the pictures below, the first two monuments are likely from the 15th or 16th C. The third one is probably 17th C. I have not had the inscriptions translated yet, so the dating is approximate only.
Ian.
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