246 



ON THE WEAPONS USED 



nothing to prove that his dress belongs to any certain period, 

 and considering that the Hindu, if conservative in any thing, 

 is especially so in his food and his dress, there is much proba- 

 bility that the uniform of the sepoy has also not been altered 

 much in subsequent times. Moreover it must not be over- 

 looked that the dress, especially the head-dress or turban 

 varies according to caste and locality. 



This remark leads me to refute an assertion made with 

 some authority by Mr. W. F. Sinclair in the Indian Anti- 

 quary of September 1878. It is in a critical notice on a few 

 slokas extracted, not quite correctly though, from the Sukramti 

 by Mr. Earn Das Sen. 137 In verse 136 we read : " The breech 

 at the vent carries stone and powder and . has a machinery 

 which produces fire when striking." Alluding to this 

 sloka Mr. Sinclair says : " From the evidence above given, it 

 seems to me that if they (those verses) are not such inter- 

 polations the whole work must be a forgery of, at best, the 

 17th century, a period which I am led to select by the 

 mention of the flint." Does Mr. Sinclair want to insinuate 

 by this, that the Hindus did not know flints, nor their peculiar 

 properties ? It is hardly credible that a nation, which is so 

 observant, should have overlooked objects of such common 

 occurrence ; or, if it knew them, that it should not have 

 applied them to some use. Is it not perhaps judging others 

 too much according to our own proficiencies, to intimate that, if 

 Europeans did not apply flints or flintlocks to guns before 

 the 17th century, no body else could have done so ? There is 

 scarcely anything so common, so well known in this country, 

 as the qualities of the flint ; in fact the Hindus are adepts in 

 any thing connected with the art of making fire. 



In the sixth book of the Nitiprakasika are enumerated all 

 the articles which a king should take with him when setting 

 out for a military expedition. After mentioning all sorts of 

 provisions and arms mention is also made in the 51st sloka 



137 Indian Antiquary, 1878, p. 136. 



