“Edgy Pleasures”

William T. Vollmann

The most significant characteristic of the lovely nineteenth-century Indian daggers I collect is their blunt edges. Their purpose, in short, is to symbolize the power and authority of weapons, much like an officer’s pistol or even a policeman’s uniform. They are talismanic, like a crucifix or a Platonic form. Evidently, beauty was an absolute requirement in their crafting, since any such dagger was metonymic with the official function of a maharaja, whose life had to symbolize perfection to the rest of society. What purpose now? The maharajas are impoverished, and even such distant cousins of these daggers as bayonets are frequently used. For acts of war, we have our bombs, flying machines, crawling machines, swimming machines; for acts of legislation, the truncheon and the gun; for acts of atrocity, again the gun. Thus, these daggers are doubly removed from sharpness. It is emblematic that the little store in Udaipur that sold them (lubricated well with coconut oil, wrapped in bundles of old newspaper) was equally forward in displaying jointed silverfish made up of many small pieces more complex than bones. This made the daggers seem even more beautifully useless, metonymic still of the maharaja but only the Maharaja of Astonishment—for instance, Sawai Madho Singh I, who was reputedly seven feet tall and four feet wide.

In Jaipur, I saw his maharani’s eighteen-pound dress. “That must have been heavy,” I said. The guide smiled. “The Indian women don’t feel the weight when it’s real gold,” he said. The real gold of these daggers is, of course, their craftsmanship. The longer I handle the smooth, yellow ivory of that camel’s head or peer into the checkered gape of that flower-inlaid tiger, the more I perceive this and the more fairylike the pieces become. I have seen the maharaja’s sun emblem: It was composed of muskets raying outward from sacredness. Surely these muskets were never fired. How blasphemous it would have been to wrench off a ray from the sun! I went to another palace, whose wooden gates were forty feet high. I saw the high window where the maharani used to welcome her husband with rose flowers. I passed through green-bordered receding arches like the leaves of artichokes. Now: the Hall of Glory. The ceiling was inlaid with silvered glass in tiny, complex pieces to shimmer a million reflected flames of a single candle. Skeletons dazzled me in the perforated marble screens. But the guide said, “Before, the maharaja had elephants. Now, not a single one!” No utility anywhere. Consider the so-called tiger knife, which is shaped like the letter A with two horizontals. The hand grips one of them: The legs of the A curve inward into parallels to enclose the wrist and lock it. The tiger comes; the point of the A stabs him; he falls dead. Functional, no doubt. But many of these tiger knives—old ones gilded, damascened, tawny-striped like tigers— are for sale. A good one goes for $3,000 (less, of course, if you bargain, cash in hand). A maharaja had placed it on consignment. The maharajas sell things incognito, I heard; the maharajas are ashamed. Sometimes, to decrease the likelihood that the knives will be recognized as theirs, they sell to distant provinces, even though there’s less money that way. This is how it must be. Recently, an art connoisseur came to buy Mogul miniatures. He asked a maharaja if anything was for sale. The maharaja said no, but if the man was serious, he knew another noble who might sell. It had to be understood, however, that the connoisseur would never meet him or learn his name. What is a tiger knife without its maharaja? And, indeed, the matter is worse, much worse, for in Udaipur I saw towers alone and incongruous upon the desert hills. Sentries used to watch there for tigers, but that was when there were still forests. The trees are all burned now. What use, then, a tiger knife? No matter whether any blade is sharp.

From a 1996 Esquire feature called “My Favorite Things.” The feature also included Charles M. Schulz, Francis Ford Coppola, David Lee Roth, Wayne Gretzky, Susan Sontag, John Travolta and many other folks on their favorite thing.