A passion for oriental weaponry

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Weapons from the ornate to the gruesome are all included in this ‘museum in a book’ says Phil Baker

Islamic and Oriental Arms and Armour: A Lifetime’s Passion by Robert Hales

In his book The Collectors, French writer and artist Philippe Jullian suggested that a taste for collecting arms ‘permits the expression of homicidal tendencies’. That there might be more to it than that is abundantly clear from this magnificent book of Eastern arms and armour put together by eminent dealer Robert Hales. Photographing his stock over the years has given him a vicarious collection of everything that passed through his hands, and the highlights are published here.  

It is an exceptional collection, with the status and identity that reside in weapons giving rise to some magnificent examples of Islamic and Oriental art. The collection ranges from Turkey to Tibet, with a particularly notable section on the kris or keris knife from the Indonesian archipelago; it is one of the most distinctive cultural items from Java and Bali, with its famous wavy blade, and no exaggeration to say that it has been closely bound up with Indonesian masculinity. The handles – sometimes collected on their own and mounted on small plinths, like tribal art figures – are particularly interesting, with some extraordinary examples including stylized ivory birds. The traditional knife of Sri Lanka, the piha kaetta, with its distinctive spray-like decoration at the foot of the blade, is also well represented, and there is a groundbreaking section on the Burmese dha – owing largely to the scholarship of Noel Singer – which is remarkable for the close figurative carving of its handle, often featuring demons.    

Of the different kinds of Indian dagger, the khanjarli is aesthetically notable for its sinuous, almost dancing curves, while the absolutely murderous-looking peshkabz (almost fiendish-looking to the orientalist eye) owes its lethally fine tip to the fact that it was designed to penetrate chain mail, worn much later in the east than in Europe. There are some notable curiosities and novelties in here, including a sporting gun from Tipu Sultan, its tiger decoration closely related to the famous ‘Tipu’s Tiger’ (a model which can be seen mauling a British soldier in the Victoria and Albert Museum).  A few of the weapons are bizarre and impractical, including a peculiar four-bladed object and a katar – the Indian punching knife, both gripped and bound to the forearm – with a flintlock on each side, which must have made the owner feel gratifyingly well armed.

The 900 or more items are a museum in a book, which is rich in pictures and not overburdened with text. Hales very modestly apologizes for the quality of some of the photographs, but this is not a serious issue. A few photos are quarantined at the end of the book as ‘Early Archive Photographs’. There is a larger problem, perhaps, in that few readers are likely to be equally interested in all the items – someone with a feeling for thekris or the dha, for example, might tend towards tribal art in their tastes and be repelled by the almost confectionary vulgarity of some of the Mogul and other Islamic weapons, plastered in diamonds, rubies and emeralds. Short of publishing a series of separate monographs, however, it is not easy to see what the author could have done about this.

Hales made his first purchase – a couple of flintlock pistols – as a very young man in Kabul in 1966, while travelling to Nepal. Collecting soon took over his life and led to dealing, first with a stand in Kensington High Street’s Antique Hypermarket, then another in Antiquarius on the King’s Road, and finally, until about ten years ago, a gallery in Kensington Church Street. This book is a historical document not just of Eastern weapons but of the hippy trail and the London antique scene. As Jonathan Barrett writes in his foreword: ‘Bob was fortunate enough to have been active during a period of relatively plentiful supply; a time that we are unlikely to see again’.

Islamic and Oriental Arms and Armour: A Lifetime’s Passion by Robert Hales, is published by Robert Hales. 400pp., fully illustrated, £85.00. ISBN 978-0-9926315-0-5