The development of the Indian katar

[Ian]

Originally Posted by Jens Nordlunde

Ian,
Thank you very much for showing the hero stones(?) from your friends family. They are very interesting, and even more so should someone, with half an hour of free time decide to start translating the texts.
The third one from the top, the one with the katar could be 16th century (but I am guessing). Compare the katar base to the one from Hamza shown in post 10. You will see that the 'V' on the base is very clear.
A century later the 'V' on the base flattened and sometimes almost disappeared.
If you look through The Hamza book you will notice that of all the daggers/knives shown more than half are 'normal' daggers, and under half are katars. If you then have a look at King of the World, made about a century later, you will see that the picture has changed, and there are more katars than daggers.
Other katar bases developed in the later centuries, likely due to a new fashion, but the ones shown in Hamza and in King of the World continued to be used for centuries. ...

Jens:

Thank you for this very specific information. So it seems that information from the memorial stones of a powerful ruling Rajput clan fits with the other historical evidence that you have collected. And your piece of information about the inverted V-shape at the base of the blade seems to add authenticity to the claim that this monument dates from the 16th or 17th C. I always think it is very neat when different data come to the same conclusions.

Please remember that my dating is approximate only, which is why I said that the use of the katar by this group was probably no earlier than the 16th C. Finding somebody to translate the archaic text has proven challenging (apparently it is neither Sanskrit nor Hindi nor modern Gujarati). And persuading an expert to visit the site to translate the text is another matter (I have been told that my pictures of the text are not very clear for translation purposes).

More to be revealed.

Ian.