Coorg Pichangatti

Rare Pichangatti Knife & Scabbard with Fine Silver & Brass Mounts

Coorg, South India

18th-19th century

length: 33cm, weight: 517g

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 rather than for use in combat. They were carried in the front of the belt. This example is of typical form but is finer and in better condition than most extant examples. The iron blade is wide with a band of incised decoration. The hilt is of iron sheaved in silver sheet that is embellished with silver studs and rosettes.

The scabbard is of rosewood with silver and brass mounts – the two metals providing a pleasing contrast with one another. The scabbard 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 one of the finest that we have seen or indeed to have been published – a similar example is illustrated in Stone (1961, p. 498), and another in Tirri (2003, p. 311). Examples also are rarely encountered, particularly compared with other types of knives and swords from the Indian sub-continent. One reason is 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.

Provenance

UK art market

Inventory no.: 1239

SOLD