Old khuk

Bri in Chi

Bri in Chi

Joined
May 28, 2003
Messages
1,815
I got my old khukuri from A. C. today. Take a look:
attachment.php
 
It's about 18" long, pretty roughly finished, dark wood handle almost black with age and dirt. Some nicks in the edge from battle damage (:confused: I presume. Smells like an old army surplus store of my youth. These were bought from the Nepali royal armory by A. C.
A piece of history or a piece of junk...you decide.
Anyone who can read the inscription will be able to shed some light. I hope it doesn't say,"Souvenir of Nepal. Made in India."
Brian
 
Might be something nicer than you think hiding under there.

Are you going to clean it up?

(Gently. Straight Murphey's & such.)
 
Length OA 19.5 "
Blade length 14.5"
Handle length 5"
Blade thickness at handle .561"
Finish looks like it has been worked over with coarse abrasive at some time in the past. See picture -
Bolster - some kind of white metal. probably iron.
No butt cap.
No sheath
Minimal rust on blade as received. Perhaps due to the aggressive abrasive mentioned above...?
Am I happy with it? Yes.
Do I know enough about old khukuris to tell good from bad? No. But for the money, it's gotta be worth it.
Brian
attachment.php
 
Brian,

can you get a better shot of the spine with the inscription? I can probably translate it for you.

--B.


edit:

I can make out a little bit from the one shot, but to really read it I'd need at least a slightly clearer shot - maybe email one to me so that you aren't limited by the bladeforums size restrictions

what I can make out so far is

......chandra.......6126

I think. chandra means 'moon', but it may be a personal name here, or the name of some regiment?


more when I can see it better.
 
I'll take the surface dirt and rust off very gingerly. It's pretty neat as-is. Might even add some browning... with discretion, of course.

It was not the same experiece as opening a triangle box from Uncle Bill and unwrapping a brand-new shiny khukuri. But fun, nun-the less.

It does have a gen-u-wine convex edge.

Do I sound happy? Of course I do.
Brian
 
The scan probably does the job,
but since I already made this I'll post it.

attachment.php

I don't know what's up or right.
 
Brian,

thanks for the scan. (ddean - nice work, I saw it after I saw brian's scan, but it probably would have worked for me.)

JP's sent me a couple of similar inscriptions on ac spines. There is a definite pattern.

here is an image of 3 spines (brian - the top one is yours):

ac-khukuri-spines.gif


all three of them contain the phrase 'shrii 3 chandra', literally something like 'thrice-honoured moon', but it must be the name of someone or something here. part of this same phrase 'shrii 3' used to be used as part of the title of the old Rana Prime Ministers (the King used, and uses, the similar phrase 'shrii 5' = "five-times-honoured").

I'm guessing here that Chandra ('Moon') is the name of a regiment (or some sort of other military grouping). Alternatively it could be the name of a general or other army commander in charge of some division. But from some other Devanagari military inscriptions I think the first possibility is more likely.

The half-circle-and-dot which occurs in the middle of all of these is not a word or number but something more like a decoration. Similar forms appear on the flats of khukuris from time to time. The dot may be a form of the sun, I don't know for sure. But these crescent moon and dot decorations appear on other Nepali blades. This symbol is called chandra-bindu, literally 'moon-dot', and is also used to mark nasal vowels in some situations, but not here.

Aside from this recurrent phrase, 'shrii 3 chandra' and the chandra-bindu marking, there is another pattern between all three. namely another word -- which again in all cases I assume to be the name of someone or something -- and a four-digit number. The number is different in each case (as is the name, at least for these 3) and I'm guessing it is something akin to a serial number. But what its exact meaning/use is, I am not sure. I have seen similar numbers stamped on Indian pieces (often along with nagari abbreviations), but don't know their exact function.

the other words on each khukuri:-- Lion, Sun, and a perplexing word 'Savu' or 'Mavu' on Brian's kukri -- these I think must be names of military subdivisions under the larger 'Shrii-3 Chandra' division (or military general?). Alternatively they could be personal names, or parts of personal names, but I think this is less likely.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to determine what this word 'mavu' or 'savu' on brian's blade means. neither possibility strikes me as a familiar word, and I have checked my basic Sanskrit, Hindi & Nepali dictionaries with no result.

The difficulty for these inscriptions (beyond deciphering the script in the first place - note that the styles of each of the three inscriptions is rather different from the others - which is surprisingly not so bad) is that the forms they use are not entirely standard. They're also not exactly in any specific language. They seem to be sort of Nepali forms of a more general northern Indian sort of not-quite-Sanskrit (popular Sanskrit?). So the basic words they use are more Sanskrit than Nepali or Hindi (but remember that Sanskrit is the ancestor of both Nepali and Hindi), but they seem to use sort of Nepali-sed forms of Sanskrit.

For instance, the Sanskrit word 'chandra' meaning "moon" seems to be spelt differently on each blade (though the one blade which I read as 'chanda' with a missing 'r', may simply have the 'r'-sign obscured). More particularly, a very interesting form appears on Brian's blade: 'cha~ndra' - which is a sort of hypercorrect Sanskrit form (the tilde ~ represents nasalising of the 'a' vowel - nasalised vowels are present in French, to give you of idea of what I mean). The real Sanskrit form is 'chandra', with no nasalisation of the vowel. But, for instance, the Hindi descendent of this word is 'chaa~d'. So the form on Brian's blade mixes in a nasalised vowel--presumably because the nasalised vowel is present in the normal spoken Nepali, Hindi, etc. forms like 'chaa~do', 'chaa~d', etc.

So interpretation is difficult in some cases because the forms are non-standard ('mistakes' or perhaps in some instances 'dialectal' forms).

But I'll keep thinking about this form 'Mavu' or 'Savu'. Maybe it's a misspelling or a particularly odd dialectal form of some word.

Hope this helps.


cheers,
--Ben
 
Good help, Beo, and thanks.

We need to remember that the fellow doing the inscriptions is most likely illiterate and is copying -- and perhaps not too accurately -- something that has been given him on a piece of paper which is wrinkled, smudged, torn, and generally what one might expect when laying around on the floor of a dirty shop for a day or two.
 
Uncle Bill wrote:
We need to remember that the fellow doing the inscriptions is most likely illiterate and is copying -- and perhaps not too accurately -- something that has been given him on a piece of paper which is wrinkled, smudged, torn, and generally what one might expect when laying around on the floor of a dirty shop for a day or two.
Click to expand...

Yes, I agree. But it is more complicated than that even. Because the 3 spine-inscriptions from the AC kukris I have seen thus far each look like they were done differently. Two of them have this recurrent phrase shrii 3 chandra first, and one of them has it second. And the one looks like it was stamped with a pre-made die/stamp, whereas one is surely engraved free-hand.

But actually I think that at least some of the inscriptions were done by literate persons - but that can cause errors itself. Someone who is illiterate and just copies exactly what he sees in some ways is more likely to reproduce text faithfully. Whereas someone is literate, or partially literate, may easily misread one word for another, or 'correct' what he thinks to be an error (which may not be). As I said, the word 'chandra' on one of these inscriptions is actually a 'hyper-correct' form, in which the nasal is marked twice.

But another difficulty with these inscriptions is that they're not exactly in Nepali. They're sort of in a Nepali-sed Sanskrit/vulgar northern Indian version of Sanskrit (sort of like a lot of the not-quite-correct Latin from the Middle Ages in Europe). And the spellings of words in Nepali even to this day are not very standardised, so that they are many alternate ways to spell words.

On another piece JP showed me, the word 'ser' was engraved. It was fairly obvious to me--esp. because there were pictorial representations of lions--that this 'ser' was written for the more correct form 'sher', meaning 'lion'. But in Nepali and also in dialectal Hindi (esp. in the east), the letter written as 'sh' is pronounced as 's'. But formal Nepali still usually writes 'sher', even though in spoken Nepali 'sh' is pronounced the same as the letter written as 's'.

The other problem is 'hyper-correct' forms, in which things, for instance, which are really written with an 's'-letter in Sanskrit are 'corrected' to 'sh'.

An interesting modern example of this I noticed on one of the khukuris made by HI's Sher Bahadur. On one of the Uncle Bill-specials I saw one of Sher's kukris which he had 'signed' with his initials in devanagari script rather than roman script. But he abbreviated his name as 'se. vaa.'

Here again, we find 's' for 'sh' (more 'correctly' he should have written 'she.' rather than 'se.') - but this is how the word 'sher' is pronounced in Nepali, so that isn't so strange. But the more interesting thing is that he abbreviated his name of Bahadur with 'vaa.'. The reason this is interesting is because spoken Nepali does indeed generally pronounce the Sanskrit sound written as 'va' as 'ba'. But here, the word 'bahadur' comes from Persian and really should be written with a 'ba', but Sher (or someone) has 'hyper-corrected' the 'ba.' to 'va.'.
 
I was also toying with the idea that this phrase 'shrii 3 chandra' refers to the Rana Prime Minister of Nepal from the early 20th-c.: Chandra Shamsher. As the traditional title for Nepali PMs was 'shrii 3...' meaning "thrice-honoured". But JP thinks that it might indeed be the name of an armoury or barracks or garrison or the like, and mean instead "Honoured Three Moon (garrison)" rather than "Thrice-Honoured Chandra (prime minister)".

SO the exact reference of these inscriptions remains obscure... if we have enough examples of these sorts of inscriptions we may be able to make a good guess at what they refer to exactly, but we may not. I can translate, but JP has the expert knowledge on what they probably refer to. But I don't think either of us have enough 'data points' to really know yet.

--B.
 
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