Derivation of Gandiva

[Kendra Crossen Burroughs]

Greetings. I have joined this List mainly to ask this question.

Can anyone offer comments on the meaning and derivation of the name of
Arjuna's bow? I could not find anything in the Skt.-English dictionary. An
internet search turned up an entry in a glossary prepared under the
direction of William Q. Judge, a founder of Theosophy, and in it it said
that Arjuna's bow was made of a plant called gandi. But I have not been able
to verify this or to find out what kind of plant gandi is or was.

I became curious about this question while compiling annotations for a
Bhagavad Gita that will be published in April by SkyLightPaths Publishing, a
small publisher in New England. I am not a scholar, obviously, merely a
researcher and writer. In my annotations  I am mainly quoting from the
well-known commentators. None of the commentators seems to have anything to
say about the word Gandiva.

Kendra Crossen Burroughs
North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina