A katar is a katar till......

[Mercenary]

Originally Posted by Jens Nordlunde

I dont know which thoughts Pant had with the plate, and it is too late to ask him,, but it seems to me that he called almost all 'katars' for jamdahar, with a few exceptions, so I dont see why we cant stick to the name katar/jamdahar and leave out all the 'artistic' names.

I fully support your opinion. For 400-600 years available to us to study, such daggers were called interchangeably katar/jamdhar.

I am little more a supporter of the term "jamdhar" only because the Mughals themself distinguished only two types of Indian daggers (not counting the well-known for them "khanjars"): "jamdhar" (H-shaped) and "khapwa" - Indian dagger with a double bend blade, falsely known to us as chilanum ("falsely" until someone will be able to find confirmation of the actual use of this term. Although it is also associated with the verb "to cut", like most other Indian weapon terms, I have not seen evidence. But please don't tell me about the "glossaries").

The Mughals clearly distinguished these two types of daggers. The term "kattara" was apparently used to refer widely to Indian daggers as a whole.