A fine gold-koftgari watered-steel push dagger (katar)
South India, 17th/ 18th Century
the double-edged watered-steel blade of slightly curved form with armour piercing tip, two fullers chiselled with split-palmette interlace to the forte to each side, the hilt decorated in gold overlay, the sidebars and cross guard with perching birds amidst foliate sprays separated by streams, the sidebars terminating in openwork split-palmette decoration, the grips of gadrooned baluster form with openwork split-palmette scrollwork to either end
46.7 cm. long
Footnotes:
Provenance
Private UK collection, formed in the mid 20th Century, and thence by descent.

For a comparable 17th Century tulwar depicting various birds with bands of flowing water, see Robert Hales, Islamic and Oriental Arms and Armour: a Lifetime's Passion, London, 2013, p. 164, no. 402. Another comparable 17th Century chape is in the same publication, featuring cypress trees and flowering shrubs with lotus flower-filled ponds (ibid p. 59, no. 123). Hales refers to the slightly darker steel of both these examples as being blackened, or dark burnished, similar to the hilt of the present lot. An 18th Century katar of comparable form is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Accession No. 36.25.696).