India's Heritage Gunmakers, And The Quiet Survival Of Bespoke Firearms

There was a moment, not so long ago, when the finest sporting guns anywhere in the British Empire were as likely to be commissioned from an address in Calcutta as from Bond Street. India's relationship with firearms craftsmanship long predates British rule, of course. Mughal and Rajput armouries produced ornately worked matchlocks and swords for centuries, objects still held today in royal family collections and museums across the country, evidence that fine metalwork and weapon-making had deep roots in India well before a single British gunmaker set up shop on Indian soil.

What arrived with the Empire was not craftsmanship itself, but a new commercial infrastructure: British trading houses that recognised, correctly, that India's maharajas, hunting parties, and colonial administrators represented one of the most lucrative markets for fine sporting arms anywhere in the world, and built entire businesses in Calcutta and Delhi to serve it. For close to a century, that business flourished on a scale most people today would find surprising, before it was dismantled almost entirely, not by a decline in skill or demand, but by the mechanics of trade policy and law.

The Firms Behind The Names

The story of the trade itself begins with a peculiarity of British gunmaking. In 19th and early 20th century Britain, gunmaking houses in London and Birmingham rarely built every gun entirely under their own roof. Many bought barrels and actions from specialist manufacturers and finished the guns in-house; others simply commissioned complete firearms from trade makers and stamped their own name onto the finished product, a practice considered entirely respectable at the time. R.B. Rodda and Company, one of the most storied of these houses, operated from London and Birmingham before opening a Calcutta shop in the 1860s, eventually settling at 7 and 8 Dalhousie Square in the heart of the city. Manton and Company, no relation to the celebrated London gunmaking family of the same name, ran parallel operations out of Calcutta and Delhi, and by the early 20th century held the standing appointment of gunmakers to every Viceroy of India, a title it displayed with evident pride on every rifle it sold. Lyon and Lyon rounded out the trio of Indian trade houses most collectors still recognise today.

These firms did not merely retail firearms. Rodda commissioned bespoke double rifles for maharajas and hunting parties, pieces engraved and finished to the same standard as anything produced for a European aristocrat, some cased in mahogany with a full complement of original accessories, the kind of object now sold at international auction as a document of an era as much as a working firearm. Manton and Company held agency relationships with the most significant names in English gunmaking, including James Purdey and Sons, Holland and Holland, and John Rigby, effectively giving Indian clients direct access to the very top of the London trade without leaving Calcutta or Delhi.

A Trade That Outlived An Empire, Then Didn't

All three houses survived India's independence in 1947, transferring to Indian ownership as the British departed. But the trade that had sustained them, imported barrels, imported actions, an entire supply chain running through Birmingham and Germany and Belgium, could not survive the end of new firearm imports that followed independence. Manton and Company eventually closed in 1965; Rodda in 1952. What had been, for close to a century, one of the more improbable outposts of British high gunmaking anywhere in the world quietly wound down within two decades of the empire it had served.

What replaced that trade was not a new generation of Indian gunmakers but a regulatory framework built almost entirely around restriction. The Indian Arms Act of 1959, and the Arms Rules that followed in 1962, brought the manufacture, sale, possession, and transport of firearms and ammunition under a licensing regime that remains, by international comparison, exceptionally strict. Even a firearm with genuine antiquarian value, a piece with no meaningful use beyond its history, technically requires a license to legally possess under Indian law, unless it falls under a narrow exemption for weapons of an obsolete pattern no longer capable of being fired. Manufacturing a new firearm for civilian use without a license is prohibited outright.

What Survives Now

What remains of India's gunmaking heritage today exists largely outside active production: in family collections passed down through generations of former royal households, in museum holdings, and in the occasional piece that surfaces at international auction houses, where a Rodda double rifle commissioned for an Indian raja or a Manton sporting gun stamped with a Viceroy's insignia can still command serious attention from collectors specifically because of that provenance. The craftsmanship these firms once represented, engraving, stocking, fine metalwork, has not disappeared from India entirely, it survives in adjacent trades, ceremonial swordsmithing, decorative metalwork, and the restoration of antique arms for licensed collectors, rather than in any functioning bespoke gunmaking industry.

It is, in that sense, a heritage that survives almost entirely in the past tense: a century of genuinely world-class craftsmanship, built by firms most people today have never heard of, ended not by a loss of skill or demand, but by the simple mechanics of a supply chain, and a set of laws, that never allowed it to continue.