New Delhi: In February this year, a collection of over 1,000 coins was sold for nearly £2 million, or Rs 21.15 crore. What set it apart was that almost every coin could be traced back to the British Raj and the ruthless multinational raider, the East India Company. One of these coins was a rare 1765 Bombay gold mohur that sold for £99,200 or Rs 1.04 crore.
Currency isn’t the first thing one associates with the East India Company, but throughout its rule until it was dissolved in 1874, the EIC pitted its might against emperors and maharajas through mints across the subcontinent, pushing local coins that couldn’t achieve popularity or faced resistance from the ruling kings. To do so, it had to contend with varied coins from regional mints, impressed with local imagery and scripts and in circulation across the country.
At his talk, ‘Coins of the Realm: A Numismatic Overview of Eighteenth Century India’, held on 7 June at New Delhi’s India International Centre, historian Sanjay Garg recited an anecdote from Mughal chronicler Khafi Khan’s accounts. When Aurangzeb found evidence of Persian-style coins in the name of King William III and Queen Mary in Surat, minted by the company to establish its own currency (which would go unnoticed by the empire’s vastly illiterate population), he was beyond outraged. Subsequently, he ordered the seizure of company members residing in the port city. He commanded his army to besiege the fort of Bombay, and for a time the EIC was powerless to produce its own currency.
The company had been operating its own mint in Bombay since 1672, and had been trying to strike European-style coinage ever since. However, this currency had two shortcomings.
First, it displeased the Mughal rulers to no end. They took these coins as an insult to the crown and Islam.
“As per Islamic ritual and kingship, written in the holy book, the divine right of the king is to read the Khutbah [sermon] in his own name on Friday prayers and also mint the coin in his own name,” said Shah Umair, a numismatist who runs the Instagram page @sikkawala.
To have their names erased from coins, especially by foreign powers, was to have this divine right taken away.
According to Garg, even the Peshwas and Patwardhans, who had a contentious relationship with Mughals, minted Mughal-style coinage (with local variations) until the early 19th century because it was the most widely circulated currency. “They tried to uniformise it [coinage] and standardised it in many ways. It united the country, from Surat to Dhaka. In people’s minds, the Mughal coin was the proper one,” said Shaikh.
Also read: Mahabharata war to Dasaratha sacrifices—Tripura’s Manikya dynasty used religion as a force
How EIC coins took root in India
But in 1717 AD, the East India Company was given the right to mint coins in the name of the Mughal emperor Farrukhsiyar on the island of Bombay. Less than a hundred years later, it rose to ascendancy in India and enacted the Coinage Act of 1835.
Shailendra Bhandare, assistant keeper at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, argued that when the company landed on the shores of the Indian subcontinent, it was driven by one goal: maximise profits from trade. The EIC neither had the political capacity nor the will to mint its own coins, let alone introduce a pan-India currency act. “What they needed, to achieve their goals, was a currency that was widely acceptable to the people,” said Bhandare.
According to Reserve Bank of India historian and former central banker Bazil Shaikh, another possible reason for the company’s desire to mint its own coins was to avoid paying brassage (charges for converting metal to currency) to the Mughal kings.
It began to mint coinage in the Mughal prototype, in the name of the Muslim emperor.
“It was not just the name on the coin that mattered. The right to mint coins was protected fervently; battles were fought over them,” said Bhandare. According to him, the Mughals, at least till Aurangzeb, did not look upon the minting of coins very favourably. Till the 18th century, EIC struggled to establish coinage that could be minted without any backlash from rulers and would be welcomed by the general public.
The death of Aurangzeb and the subsequent chaos of the century allowed the EIC to strengthen its hold over the subcontinent, both politically and financially.
The crumbling Mughal empire gradually lost its monopoly over coins. “From 1717 to 1765, there was a monetary disarray. Nobody followed a standard of content or design,” said Shaikh.
Initially, this benefited the EIC. As the Mughals outsourced their authority to intermediaries in regional areas, the company manipulated and bribed Mughal deputies into giving up control of these mints. According to Bhandare, these middlemen helped the English obtain Emperor Farrukhsiyar’s consent to produce Mughal coins at the Bombay Mint in 1717.
Also read: This is how Shiva became Asia’s most popular god – innovation, assimilation, conquest
Mughal coins, English mints
At the time, the EIC did not have the political stronghold to mint its own coins, but it did have the capacity and the freedom to mint Mughal coinage. “They were now equal stakeholders in the monetary landscape,” said Bhandare.
In 1765, it officially became the ruling body in the subcontinent when it acquired the powers of Diwan-i-Bengal. This meant that the company would now collect revenue. “This is when the company became aware of the cons of collecting revenue with the variety of coins in the market. The transaction rate was higher with different coins. They wanted a coin with which revenue could be collected without dispute,” said Shaikh.
Till 1835, the company minted coins in the name of Shah Alam, the puppet ruler, even after he was long dead. Shaikh also highlighted the company’s effort to standardise coins post-1765. They ‘demonetised’ various coins until only five varieties across India remained. By 1793, the varieties were reduced to three, and the year inscribed on the coin was fixed.
Shift to ‘uniform coinage’
By the time the EIC defeated the Marathas in the 19th century, it had already established a complete political stronghold over India. It now had the legal authority to create its own currency in most places. “There was no need to pay tokens to the Mughal; they were loyal to William IV,” said Shaikh.
Thus, the Uniform Coinage Act of 1835 was enacted. Coins with William IV’s face inscribed were minted and circulated across the subcontinent.
“This was the first time that the people of India were seeing the portrait of the king, in a different country, ruling them,” said Umair, highlighting the significance of these coins.
However, this drastic shift in coinage wouldn’t affect common people as much, as they were accustomed to different rulers and their currencies. “It was not possible for them to realise how big a change this was. They were paying taxes anyway. The merchants would not have a problem with the East India Company. They had been doing business with them for the last 150-plus years,” said Krishnokoli Hazra.
Not all accounts of the change in coins are as complacent, though. As mentioned by both Umair and Bhandare, the ‘shroffs’ or money changers of the time were staunchly opposed to the uniform coinage that would snatch their source of income. It took nearly 50 years for the uniform coinage to stabilise.
According to Bhandare, the arrival of machine mints and the railway (both gifts of the Industrial Revolution) sealed the deal. The company flooded the markets with its coins. The British coin only strengthened under the English crown as further regulations were brought in, including the Paper Currency Act of 1861 and the Uniform Coinage Act of 1906.
More than 130 years after its ignominious end, the EIC was revived—by Indian businessman Sanjiv Mehta. He bought the intellectual property rights of the company in 2005 with the aim of converting it into a luxury brand. Today, its flagship store in London sells luxury teas, chocolates—and coins.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)