Talwar

The talwar is a curved sword of the Indian subcontinent, evolving from Turko-Persian sabers that arrived in India with the Turko-Persian conquests and the Delhi Sultanate of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and reaching its familiar classical form, with a broad curved blade and a distinctive disc-shaped pommel, as it crystallized under the Mughal Empire between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Its elaborate all-metal hilt, refined by Indian smiths from the early sixteenth century onward, gave a firm one-handed grip suited to mounted use, and the talwar became the characteristic cavalry sword of a wide range of Indian powers, including Mughal, Rajput, Maratha and Sikh forces, each of whom adopted and adapted the basic form. The talwar belongs to the same broad family of curved single-edged sabers as the Persian shamshir, the Turkish kilij and the Afghan pulwar, reflecting the shared Central and West Asian sword traditions that spread across the early modern Islamic and Indian world.