🪙 Coins and money

Weights of chert

Exchanges were regulated by a precise system of weights, usually cubes of a stone called chert, with no markings.

Standard weights

➗ Mathematics · Harappan cities

The lower denominations were binary (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32) and the higher ones decimal (160, 200, 320, 640); the smaller weights were probably for jewellery and beads.

Guilds (shrenis)

Guilds of craft producers and merchants probably procured raw materials, regulated production and marketed finished goods.

Guilds and coins

Traders, craftsmen, moneylenders and agriculturists formed guilds (shrenis) with elected heads, sharing information and making their own rules. Growing trade also brought India’s first coins — silver punch-marked coins — which were exchanged across regions.

Punch-marked coins

The earliest coins were named for the way symbols were punched or stamped onto the metal surface.

Kings' names and faces

The first coins to bear the names and images of rulers were issued by the Indo-Greeks in the northwest.

The first gold coins

The first gold coins were issued c. first century CE by the Kushanas, whose rulers also took the title devaputra, ‘son of god’.

Coins of a tribal republic

Several thousand copper coins of the Yaudheyas of Punjab and Haryana show that tribal republics too took part in trade.

The first dated coins

The coins of the Western Kshatrapas, who ruled western India between the 1st and 4th centuries CE, are reckoned the earliest coins bearing dates — given in the Saka era, which begins in 78 CE and is the official calendar of the Indian Republic.

Ships on Satavahana coins

Many Satavahana coins show ships, which suggests that sea trade was an important part of economic life; their trade networks reached as far as the Roman Empire.

Roman coins in south India

Hoards of Roman coins found in south India show that trade networks reached far beyond political boundaries.

Gupta gold

Some of the most spectacular gold coins were issued by the Gupta rulers.

Kharosthi read from coins

Indo-Greek coins carried kings' names in Greek and Kharosthi, so letters could be matched — as in names such as Apollodotus — and Kharosthi inscriptions were found to be in Prakrit.

Seated Lakshmi coins

After the Guptas gold coins became rare, until the Kalachuri ruler Gangeyadeva revived them with his ‘Seated Lakshmi’ coins, which later rulers copied.

Crests of the southern dynasties

South Indian coins carried dynastic crests: the boar of the Chalukyas, the bull of the Pallavas, the tiger of the Cholas, the fish of the Pandyas, the bow and arrow of the Cheras and the lion of the Hoysalas.

The tanka and the jital

Under the Delhi Sultanate the unit of account became the tanka, with jitals as the smaller coins. Coins were struck in gold, silver and copper, and the money economy expanded considerably.

Raziyya’s coins

On her inscriptions and coins, Raziyya stated that she was the daughter of Sultan Iltutmish.

Muhammad bin Tughlaq’s token coins

Between 1329 and 1332 Muhammad bin Tughlaq tried a token currency of brass and copper. Mass forgeries made it a total disaster, and he redeemed all the tokens, forged or genuine.

Vijayanagara’s gold pagodas

Vijayanagara’s standardised gold coins, many bearing Lord Venkateshvara of Tirupati, inspired the ‘Single Swami’ pagodas of the Dutch and French and the ‘Three Swami’ pagodas of the English East India Company.

Sher Shah’s rupiya

Sher Shah Suri, who ruled Delhi briefly from 1540 to 1545, issued a silver coin called the rupiya. Weighing 178 grains, it was the precursor of the modern rupee and stayed largely unchanged until the early 20th century; his system of gold, silver and copper coins carried on under the Mughals.

Akbar's silver rupya

NCERT shows a silver rupya issued by Akbar; expanding trade brought huge amounts of silver bullion into Asia, and a large part of it went to India.

Jahangir’s zodiac coins

Mughal coin design matured under Akbar. Jahangir took a personal interest in his coinage — zodiac signs, portraits and verses — and some of his surviving gigantic coins are among the largest issued in the world.

Shivaji’s coins

Shivaji first issued coins in 1664, when he took the title of Raja, and issued them again to mark his coronation at Raigad in 1674. These coins are rare.

Coins in the name of the Gurus

Under Banda Bahadur, the Khalsa declared its sovereign rule by striking coins in the names of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh.

Hundis and trading communities

The hundi — a written instruction to pay someone — let merchants move funds across political borders without carrying money, making them less vulnerable to plunder. Communities such as the Marwaris built systems of credit and trust that worked across regimes.

The Bank of Hindostan

Among India’s earliest bank notes were those of the Bank of Hindostan (1770–1832), set up by the agency house of Alexander and Company. It survived three panic runs but failed when its parent firm went under in the crisis of 1832.

Presidency Bank notes

Bank notes came into wide use with the semi-government Presidency Banks, notably the Bank of Bengal, set up in 1806 as the Bank of Calcutta; the Bank of Bombay followed in 1840 and the Bank of Madras in 1843.

The Paper Currency Act

The Paper Currency Act of 1861 took away the banks’ right to issue notes; the Government of India went on issuing currency notes until the Reserve Bank was set up.

The Reserve Bank of India

Set up on the recommendations of the Hilton Young Commission under the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934, the Reserve Bank began work on 1 April 1935. Its first currency offices included Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Rangoon, Karachi, Lahore and Cawnpore.

The Reserve Bank after Partition

After Partition the Reserve Bank served as Pakistan’s central bank until June 1948, when the State Bank of Pakistan began work. Set up as a shareholders’ bank, the Reserve Bank was nationalised in 1949.

The Anna series

Republic India’s first coins, issued on 15 August 1950, replaced the King’s portrait with the Lion Capital of the Ashoka Pillar; a sheaf of corn replaced the tiger on the one-rupee coin. One rupee was still 16 annas — or 192 pies.

Decimal coinage: the naya paisa

The Indian Coinage Act, amended in September 1955 to adopt a metric system, came into force on 1 April 1957. The rupee kept its value and name but was now divided into 100 paise instead of 16 annas or 64 pice; the new paisa was called the ‘naya paisa’ until 1 June 1964.

UPI

The Unified Payments Interface, developed by the National Payments Corporation of India, was launched as a pilot in April 2016 with 21 member banks and opened to the public in August 2016. It lets people pay bank to bank from their mobile phones.