[Rumil]

Steel bows, well seems I was wrong in two different directions! Maybe the modern bows I've seen were made of composite materials or something, they didn't look like wood to the untrained observer.

Anyway, I did some digging online and came up with references to steel bows in Medieval and later India. It seems as if these were made because steel was the new high tech high status material and weren't as effective as the traditional composite bow.

Anyway, I quote....

Sadly though, by middle of this century times had changed and today this custom of archery has virtually died. There are, however, some individuals still alive who received the traditional and highly ritualistic training in archery. In January 1995 I had an opportunity to speak with one such person, His Highness Thulajendra Raja P. Bhonsle Chatrapathy, the senior member of the royal line of Maratha kings who once ruled in Tanjavur, in Tamilnadu, India.

With the help of Professor R. Vivekanandagopal, a scholar attached to the Tamil University of Tanjavur, I spoke with the raja for several hours in his palace. Even at 78 he was quite a lively figure who attributed his robust health to his earlier martial discipline. Our discussion had a certain poignancy about the skill he acquired in archery some sixty years earlier, for he was the last of his line to have received traditional training. By the time he was fifteen or so a fascination with European customs helped foster an indifference to traditional Indian sports. As the raja put it, they cast their bows aside for tennis rackets.

Tanjavur Bows

The raja described the bows he trained with as shorter recurved bows, made out of metal. He recalled a tradition that the bow should be as tall as the individual, but he remembered his bows as shorter, maybe 36" when braced. A couple of examples of these short metal recurve bows are on display in the Government Museum of Madras. Both steel and brass bows were used by members of royal families in competition during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Steel bows have a long history in India, as very early texts make mention of steel bows. By the time of the Mughal period (beginning mid-1500s), steel bows that were highly decorated, sometimes with gold and silver inlay, were fixtures in royal households. Though there is evidence that steel bows were earlier used in warfare, by the end of the seventeenth century of so, they may have become weapons for royal display. Several sources maintain that the range of a steel bow was limited in comparison with the composite bows of India. However, Robert P. Elmer, in his classic work, Target Archery, notes an advantage of a steel bow. Being of metal, it "never needed to be unstrung and so it could be kept at hand in the house as a weapon for instant defense."

The Tanjavur raja stated he trained with a bow made out of brass, a metal that many archery aficionados whom I have since spoken with have questioned. But the king was emphatic: his bow was brass. He may have meant bronze, as in India, the two terms are used inter-changeably.

The king described his bow as short, rounded, both in the grip and along its body, and decorated with a floral motif etched in the back. The ears of the bow were highly articulated, curling towards the back of the bow. He also drew a picture of what he called the kalasam (see figure 1), a tear-drop shaped plate projecting out from the back of the bow above the grip that served to fix the aiming point when shooting. He recalled the strength drawing the bow required of him, noting that the extent to which a bow was drawn depended upon an individual's ability. He remembered the bow string being made out of animal--perhaps cow--gut