4811

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    Pichangatti Knife & Scabbard with Fine Silver & Gold Mounts

    Coorg, South India
    18th-19th century

    length: 31.3cm

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    Provenance

    Scottish art market

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    Pichangatti knives were the indigenous knives of the Coorg people of the Kingdom of Mysore in what is now Karnataka state. Such knives tended to be more utilitarian for everyday use rather than for use in combat. They were carried in front, from the belt.

    The example here is of typical form but is finer than most extant examples and has the added attraction of gold mounts.

    The iron blade is wide and has a band of incised decoration. The hilt is of iron sheaved in silver sheet that is embellished with silver studs and rosettes, and gold overlay.

    The scabbard is of wood with silver mounts and terminates with a well-cast silver lotus bud. Elsewhere, the silver is decorated with applied twisted wire bands.

    A thick chain of well-cast segments is suspended from a loop attached to the scabbard. Tools for personal grooming such as ear picks and nail cleaners would have been attached to this chain.

    Elgood (1995, p. 184) reproduces a watercolour of around 1850 held in the India Office Library, London, of a Coorg man dressed in traditional costume, holding a distinctive Coorg gun and with a Coorg knife not unlike this example in his waistband.

    Overall, this pichangatti is particularly fine. Related examples are illustrated in Stone (1961, p. 498), and another in Tirri (2003, p. 311). But generally, examples are infrequently encountered, partly because in response to an outbreak of violence near Malappuram in 1884, the local British administration confiscated all arms, seizing 17,295 weapons . The Madras Museum selected a few of the better examples and the remainder were dumped into the sea (Elgood, 1995, p. 185).

    References

    Caravana, J. et al, Rites of Power: Oriental Weapons: Collection of Jorge Caravana, Caleidoscopio, 2010.

    Elgood, R., Firearms of the Islamic World: In the Tareq Rajab Museum, Kuwait, IB Taurus Publishers, 1995.

    Stone, G.C., A Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor in all Countries and in all Times, first published in 1934, Jack Brussel, 1961.

    Tirri, A.C., Islamic Weapons: Maghrib to Moghul, Indigo Publishing, 2003.

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