The Wood in a Mudgar: What Sheesham Actually Is

Start with a correction to our own labels.

We call our range rosewood. "Indian rosewood" is not a species, it is a trade name, and the CITES wood identification reference uses it as the heading for Dalbergia latifolia, whose listed English trade names include East Indian rosewood, Bombay blackwood and Malabar rosewood. The wood we actually use is Dalbergia sissoo, usually called sheesham, though "shisham" is recorded as a local name for latifolia too, so no common name here is clean. CITES has called sissoo North Indian rosewood, which is how the confusion survives.

So: sheesham. Here is what is actually known about it, what that means for something you swing, and where the honest answer is that nobody has measured it.

The tree

Dalbergia sissoo is native across the Himalayan foothills and the subcontinent, from Afghanistan and Iran through Pakistan, Nepal, India and Bangladesh into Myanmar, and it grows wild on periodically flooded ground along rivers up to about 1,500 metres.

Much of what reaches the market is not wild, though nobody can put a number on it. The CITES trade analysis records that harvest or trade primarily uses cultivated trees, while noting that wild exports have been reported and that it is not possible to tell what proportion is wild sourced. Plantation stock is variable by nature, and somebody has measured how variable the wood on sale actually is.

Sheesham is not one number

A 2019 study bought sheesham from ten markets across Himachal Pradesh and tested it (Sunny et al., Journal of Tropical Agriculture, 2019). Specific gravity ran from 0.517 to 0.644, mean 0.575, and moisture content from 10.8 to 20.2 percent. Modulus of rupture averaged 97 MPa, inside PROTA's published 91 to 104 range, but mean bending stiffness came in at 8,640 MPa against a published 9,300 to 11,500, with only two sites reaching inside that band.

ICRAF gives sheesham heartwood a specific gravity of 0.62 to 0.82. Market stock averaged 0.575: lighter than the reference heartwood, sold under the same name. We have used the study's tables, because its abstract and tables disagree in several places.

The one property where sheesham clearly wins

It is not hardness, and it is not strength. It is that the wood barely moves.

Green to oven dry, from the USDA Wood Handbook (Table 3-5) for the four North American woods and from PROTA for sheesham. Sheesham moves roughly half as much as beech or hickory, and about two thirds as much as white ash.

For a turned object made in one climate and lived with in another, that is the property that counts. Wood does not stop moving once it is dry. Below about 30 percent moisture content it shrinks and swells with the humidity around it, for as long as it exists. Seasoning does not stop that. It brings the wood to the moisture content where it will move least where it is going to live, which the Wood Handbook puts at 6 to 10 percent for most of the United States, drier in the southwest and wetter on humid coasts.

Hardness is not toughness, and the difference matters

Hardness is resistance to denting, measured by pressing a steel ball in to one half its diameter and recording the load. Work to maximum load is the energy a specimen absorbs up to maximum load in a bending test, which the Handbook describes as the ability to absorb shock with some permanent deformation and some injury to the specimen. Impact bending is a drop-hammer test. Both measure capacity to take energy, not resistance to denting.

The illustration is in the handbook's own table. Sugar maple is harder than white ash, 1,450 pounds-force against 1,320, yet takes a drop-hammer hit less well, impact bending 39 inches against 43. On work to maximum load the two are level, 16.5 against 16.6. Hardness ranks them one way, and the energy measures either reverse it or ignore it.

And the wood everyone agrees is toughest, the one American axe handles are made of, is hickory, whose work-to-maximum-load figures run from 22.6 to 30.4 against white ash at 16.6 and beech at 15.1. USDA publishes no side hardness figure for the true hickories at all. The standard handle wood has no official hardness number, which tells you how much hardness predicts about surviving use.

Sheesham is widely quoted at 1,660 pounds-force on the Janka scale, above sugar maple, white ash and beech, though below pecan hickory at 1,820. We have not been able to trace that 1,660 figure to a primary wood science source, only to a secondary compilation, so treat it as indicative. More to the point: no published toughness or impact figure exists for sheesham. Nobody has run the test. We cannot tell you how it compares to hickory on the measure that actually matters, and neither can anyone else.

What ten to one actually forces

Steel is about 7,850 kg per cubic metre. Sheesham heartwood is about 770 at 12 percent moisture, inside PROTA's 750 to 800 range. Roughly ten to one, and closer to twelve to one if your stock is at the market average measured above.

It is tempting to turn that into a claim about leverage. It does not work. Volume scales as the cube of length, so ten times the volume is only about 2.2 times larger in each direction, and where the mass sits relative to your hands is a decision the maker makes, not something density dictates. Our leverage piece works that through separately.

What the density ratio really forces is size, and a ceiling.

Ten kilograms of sheesham is about thirteen litres of wood, a sphere roughly 29 cm across. The same ten kilograms in steel is 1.3 litres, a ball about 13.5 cm across. Run it the other way and it gets starker: a sheesham head the size of a 10 kg steel head would weigh about one kilogram.

So a wooden mace is not a lighter version of a steel one. To reach a useful weight it has to be physically large, so the mass gets distributed along a shaft rather than concentrated in a ball, which makes it a differently shaped tool with a different balance point and a different resistance to being swung. It also means there is a practical ceiling: past some weight the head is simply too large to grip and control. We have not seen that ceiling measured, and we are not going to invent a number for it.

The thing that actually breaks them

Not hardness. Grain direction.

A 2020 study tested hickory, ash, elm, beech and maple in bending at grain slopes from 0 to 15 degrees (Mania, Siuda and Roszyk, Materials, 2020). These are the European species, not the North American ones in the table above. Over that range, bending strength fell by around 56 percent in hickory and 60 percent in ash. Stiffness fell by a similar amount, 53 percent and 65 percent. And across all five species the property the authors found most sensitive to grain slope was work to maximum load, the energy absorption, down by more than half in every one of them and by nearly 70 percent in ash.

The authors put it plainly: a common reason for wooden tool handles cracking is that the fibres do not run parallel to the handle's axis.

Fifteen degrees is not much. It is the difference between a blank cut along the grain and one cut slightly across it, and it is invisible under a finish. It is decided before anyone touches a lathe.

Moisture is the other one. The US Forest Service specification for a Pulaski axe allows only three hickory species for the handle and requires moisture content not to exceed 12 percent at assembly. Sheesham has to be air dried slowly because it splits at the ends, though PROTA notes that once dry it is very stable in service.

What nobody can tell you

There is no published toughness, impact bending or vibration damping figure for sheesham.

Wood does damp vibration far better than metal: measured bending-mode damping in wooden baseball bats runs about an order of magnitude higher than in unmodified aluminium ones. But that is a laboratory measurement on suspended bats tapped with an instrumented hammer, against aluminium rather than steel. A swung mace is not a bat, and a hammer tap is not a ball.

Wood also conducts heat a couple of hundred times more slowly than steel, which is exactly why a steel handle feels cold and a wooden one does not. That is a fact about your hands. It is not a fact about your joints, and the two get run together constantly.

On lifespan there is nothing at all. No durability testing of swung implements, no service life data. "Lasts a lifetime" has no evidence behind it, ours included.

None of that makes the material a bad choice. It makes the confident claims about it worth checking.

And the gap that surprised us most: the published literature on mace and club training runs to three journal papers and three conference abstracts, and most of them never say what the implement was made of. The exception is the 2023 clubbell trial in female handball players, which specifies oak clubbells at 500 g and 1 kg. We have found no study that treated material as a variable, meaning one that compared one material against another.

Looking after one

Less than you have been told. The Canadian Conservation Institute says flatly that, contrary to popular belief, wood does not need to be fed, and that no amount of oil will keep it from drying out if the humidity is too low. What protects wood is a stable environment. That guidance is written for furniture rather than for something you sweat on and drop, so read it as a direction rather than a protocol.

Tagda Raho makes and sells sheesham mudgars and gadas. The shrinkage, hardness and shock figures here come from the USDA Wood Handbook and PROTA, the market variability study from the Journal of Tropical Agriculture, and the grain slope figures from Materials. Where we could not find a source we have said so rather than filling the gap.