The earliest known illustration of an Afghan Pulwar

[Sakalord364]

Originally Posted by Jim McDougall

These are outstanding insights toward the distinctive saber form known as the Afghan paluoar. The actual history of these swords has always, in my impression, been elusive. For some time the styling of the hilt was in degree regarded as having influences from the Deccan, and given the connections between Pathan presence in those regions that does seem likely. However it is hard to place the exact directional trend given the paucity of illustrations to gauge such provenance, and this illustration is so incredibly important....thank you for sharing it here!

While Egerton (1885) includes the paluoar in one of the color plates of illustration with a grouping of tulwars, he does not specify it as other than a variant of the tulwar. The actual term 'paluoar' seems to derive from Rockstuhl and Col. Yule's glossary and to have a Persian root (which seems plausibly correct) and Rawson (1967, p.86) suggests that the Indian term 'tulwar' was derived from the term 'paluoar'.

What I am wondering is if there was an actual colloquial term locally in these Afghan regions for this distinctively styled saber we know as paluoar. In the case of the well known 'Khyber knife' (from British 'Hobson-Jobsen) we know that it was locally termed 'silliwar' (sic) and from there the curious term 'silliwar yataghan' evolved.

Also, it seems that the Dir regions (in now Afghanistan) located in the Khyber Pakhtunkwa (between Chitral and Peshawar) was inhabited by tribes of the Yousafzai Pathans. Perhaps this illustration gives us a prevalence of the form as used regionally?

In the Drawings British artists made during the 1810s-1840s in Afghanistan, all the swords worn by Afghans were either Shamshir or Tulwar variants, yet in the photographs from the 1870s onwards Pulwars appear to be extremely common and ubiquitous, worn by regular footsoldiers, to tribesmen, to Generals, all the way up to the Emir himself.

So why would the sword hilt that is uniquely Afghan skyrocket in popularity during the late 19th century, which was a time of profound outside (European) influence in Afghanistan? Of course this could be simple coincidence and the British simply happened to draw people who weren’t wearing pulwars.