My understanding that any steel blade was defined as made of "loha": steel in West India .
This comes from consultations with my Indian colleagues. One of them consulted with her parents, retired language professors in India. They specifically stated that they were uninformed about terminology used in East India; thus my rather awkward first paragraph.
They also stated that the word pulad was an adopted term from Farsi, and also referred to just steel in general.
I could not elucidate from them whether there was a special term for mechanical damaskus, but that might have been a result of their rather commonplace ignorance of metallurgical terminology. I am sure 99% of American language professors also wouldn't know the correct answer in English:-)
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