Abstract
What is offered below is a study of the Mughal currency system during the reigns of Akbar (1556–1605) and Jahāngīr (1605–27). The stream of gold and silver coming to India through the Spanish exploitation of the New World enabled the Mughal Empire to shift from a copper coinage under the Lodis to a monetary system based on the silver rupee under Sher Shah and Akbar. The silver rupee now replaced the copper dām as the main unit of currency though copper coins (dām and tanka) still continued to circulate widely in low monetary transactions. This article traces the story of the evolution of Mughal monetary systems till Jahāngīr’s death (1627). It studies in detail the different problems that beset Mughal monetary policy in the successive stages of its evolution.
Keywords
Introduction
Derived from nomisma, the Greek term for coined money, numismatics may be defined as a systematic study of those objects that give concrete expressions to monetary values. These objects primarily comprise coins but also include tokens and non-metallic currencies. Numismatics, therefore, is different from monetary history, which is concerned with the practice of creating and circulating money and its impact on society and the economy rather than the physical form of money. Numismatics is regarded as an ancillary discipline of history because, here too, the purpose is to comprehend and reconstruct, from a historical standpoint, the circumstances that determine the form of the object accepted as money. For this purpose, numismatists are required to draw upon the results obtained from historical investigations while conducting physical examinations of money forms. Monetary historians’ interest in numismatic evidence is sustained by its primary and contemporary character and by the fact that it is the most direct expression of the money economy. Since historians are generally not expected to be technically fully competent in handling numismatic material, they invoke the expertise of numismatists to utilise their information in the most effective and fruitful manner. It is this interdependence between numismatics and history that will be the focus of our attention in this article in the context of Mughal monetary history.
The interface between numismatics and monetary history has different shades, each determined by the degree of interdependence between the two disciplines. In purely numismatic studies, which are rooted in the physical analysis of coins to highlight their antiquity, artistic importance, political and genealogical significance and relevance for the identification of place names, little support is drawn from textual evidence. The sources here consist chiefly of material objects, namely coin hoards, museum and private collections, coin weights and instruments used for crafting coins. Such an approach of focusing exclusively on the artefacts becomes more current when numismatic data are deemed sufficient to achieve the objective of the study. Before S. H. Hodivala strongly advocated the use of textual sources, studies of Mughal coinage largely remained in the domain of pure numismatic analysis. 1 Here, the questions that numismatists asked were defined strictly by the parameters of their discipline. Coins epitomised money and metrology represented monetary history. 2
Coin-based analysis, however, becomes a necessity when textual evidence either does not exist or cannot be combined to satisfactorily address such questions as are raised in the process of making a particular historical enquiry. This also involves, at the same time, a broadening of the parameters of inquiry with a different set of interests and a different focus. To a large extent, the credit for this goes to W. H. Moreland, who placed numismatic evidence in a wider context and raised questions germane to monetary history. 3 At the same time, his preoccupation with the indices of economic growth set up a trajectory for his contemporaries as well as a future generation of economic and monetary historians. 4
The above was an example of one extreme in the spectrum of relationships between numismatics and monetary history. At the other extreme lies the history of the modern monetary economy, which is hardly based on any analysis of banknotes or coins. The fiduciary nature of modern money as well as the level of documentation provided for its introduction, circulation and withdrawal make it largely unnecessary to scrutinise the monetary medium itself in order to reach any meaningful conclusions.
The study of Mughal Indian history occupies a somewhat intermediate stage, temporally and methodologically, in the spectrum, and so allows us to raise a few important issues where the correlation between numismatic and textual evidence can be demonstrated in a convincing fashion.
Numismatic Evidence and the Transition of Currency Regimes
In recent writings on Mughal monetary history, the treatment of currency purely as an instrument of macroeconomic modelling has perhaps obscured both the complex nature of its usage and its pattern of circulation. For instance, it is well known now that the influx of silver from the late sixteenth century established the ascendancy of the silver rupees in the Mughal Empire and virtually ended the regime of billon and copper coins. What is not known is how this transition actually took place, and there remains a certain mystery over the evolution of Mughal currency in the sixteenth century. One reason for this is perhaps the preoccupation of current historical writing with the influx of silver in the seventeenth century and its impact on the economy, made available by more than ample European documentation and situated within the framework of the quantity theory of money. 5 The information in textual sources, as well as the numismatic evidence, has scarcely been utilised although it offers interesting insights into the evolution of the currency system as well as the formulation of Mughal monetary policies.
The conventional position on the transition, from one currency regime to another in the Mughal Empire, is that although the process of replacement of copper by silver had already begun, it was completed only in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Two sets of evidence have been presented to support this argument. First, taxes, prices and wages in the sixteenth century were stated in copper money, and second, the bimetallic ratio (price of silver in copper or of gold in silver) began to change only from 1615 onwards. According to this argument, the exchange rates of silver, copper and gold remained in equilibrium between 1582 and 1615, and the expansion in silver circulation did not alter the copper–silver ratio even though the copper sector contracted substantially. The stability in exchange rates was attributed to the simultaneous demand for silver in the monetary economy and for copper in the industrial sector while the demand and supply of gold remained constant. 6 At approximately 1615, silver expansion reached the threshold beyond which the exclusive copper domain of petty transactions was retained. From now, silver began to fall against both metals, and against commodities in general. The implication of this argument is that since the rupee held its purchasing power until 1615, a rise in the quantity of total money in circulation began only at this stage. The Price Revolution in India took place in the silver century of the Mughal Empire. 7
The problem with this argument is twofold. First, the hypothesis is based on the official exchange rates furnished by Abū’l Faẓl, which do not necessarily represent currency rates in the market. Second, a careful correlation of numismatic and textual evidence reveals not only that silver circulation began much earlier than the conventional date but also that silver appreciated against both copper and gold, contra quantity theory of money. It is, therefore, important for us to look at the numismatic and textual evidence closely to identify the problem and offer solutions.
In a section entitled ‘Coins of the Eternal Empire (nuqūd-i jāwīd daulat)’, the Ā’īn-i Akbarī, a key primary source for money and monetary institutions, provided a detailed listing of a variety of Mughal coins in all three metals with their weights, denominations and exchange rates at around 1595. The principal copper coin recorded in this inventory was the dām of 323 grains, with its previous designation given as paisa, of which 40 pieces were exchanged for a silver rupee. It was also mentioned that a half dām was called the adhela. The value of the round gold muhr of 169 grains was quoted at ₹9 a piece. 8
In Akbar’s empire, before the dām entered official parlance, sometime between 1582 and 1595, all accounting was performed in a unit called tanka, each valued at two copper dāms. 9 From 1598, a copper coin of 646 grains (twice the weight of the dām) was minted with the designation tanka inscribed on it (Table 1). Among the fractional pieces of this coin struck by the mints, a coin with the name nīm tanka (half tanka) corresponded to the weight and size of the dām. From the correlation of the textual and numismatic evidence, it is clear that the tanka was not a real coin. But a money of account linked to the dām at a fixed rate. Although the minting of the copper tanka or double dām stopped during the reign of the Mughal emperor Jahāngīr (1605–27), the designation was still used to express the relationship between the money of account and the dām. 10
Copper Tankas of Akbar.
The Mughal economy in the beginning was heavily dependent on the pre-existing regime of billon and copper currencies for revenue and salary payments and commercial transactions, even though it minted its own rupee and dām. It seems that the administration devised a copper money of account (tanka-i murādī) to link different currencies with rupees and dāms at all levels of collection and disbursements. The value of the tanka was permanently pegged to the Mughal copper dām at a ratio of 1:2 from the beginning, and it was through this value that the silver price of copper came to be expressed in the money of account. In 1582, the rupee was linked to the tanka at the rate of 1:20 and to the dām at that of 1:40.
The employment of a money of account when quoting prices, wages and revenue collections in textual sources has created difficulties for historians in estimating the extent of usage of various currencies in the economy and the exact timing of the emergence of a silver currency regime. The figures quoted in tankas in official sources do not necessarily mean that the actual currency in use was copper. The currency used may have been silver, but the account was maintained in copper to draw a fixed balance sheet of income and expenditure. I have tried to show elsewhere that silver started flowing in limited quantities into the core region of the empire from the middle of the sixteenth century, and its first use was documented in the region of Agra, which is situated close to a major trade route. After 1575, the process of the economic absorption of silver into the economy began at a rapid pace. There were two major factors responsible for integrating the foreign supply of silver into the Mughal currency structure: first, the territorial expansion of the empire to the western coast; second, a series of administrative measures taken to streamline currency circulation. The first established a direct link between rupee production in coastal towns and its circulation in the hinterland, while the second allowed it to be absorbed into the rural economy through taxation and a continuous supply of currency media from the mint via recoinage. 11
Textual Evidence and Monetary Policies: ‘Break’ in Coin Production
Numismatists are required to combine literary sources with catalogues of coins in order to go outside their specialised domain and draw on the resources of historians. The results of this approach are indeed quite rewarding, as seen from the mystery surrounding an important phase of the Mughal monetary history. The intriguing issue to be discussed below obscured our understanding of what occurred after the centralisation of the Mughal mint administration in 1577–78 and the decentralisation of the fiscal apparatus in 1580.
In various museum collections in the world today, there are a number of gold and silver coins (muhrs and rupees) of Akbar with the date alf [millennium]. In issuing the coins of the alf series, Akbar made some unusual decisions. First, the date on the coin was inscribed in words and not in figures. Until now, all gold and silver coins had been struck with figures of the Hijri years (years of the Islamic calendar). Second, if alf referred to the year 1000 (written in Persian as yak hazār) of the Hijri era (1591–92
Numismatists and historians found as very curious the absence of coins from the major mints of the Mughal Empire between 1581–82 and 1590–91.
12
The coins reappear in 1591–92 in large numbers with the mint name Urdū Z¨afar Qarīn and with the date alf. Among scholars who have tried to explain this phenomenon, John Deyell is the most detailed. According to him, it was the result of the ‘simultaneous closing of the mints’ during the entire decade of the 1580s. Deyell suggested that the primary function of the Mughal mints was to remint the previously accumulated coins or the obsolete coins of the current regime, and once this process was complete the mint operations became uneconomical. This, in his view, happened in 1590–91. Deyell discounts the share of the freshly supplied bullion in the mint output and offers a logical explanation:
If several major mints faced this cost squeeze for a few years, becoming only marginally profitable, the government may have decided to suspend all recoinage throughout the empire pending further organization of the mints.
13
The decade-long ‘disappearance’ of coins is supported by a survey of numismatic evidence. The specimens preserved in museum collections and unpublished reports of the Lucknow Museum of the hoards discovered in the United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh) reveal that the representation of silver coins from every mint (except Ahmadabad) stopped at 1581–82 (990 Hijri) and restarted only in 1591–92 (1000 Hijri). Gold coins also disappear, and even in the Ahmadabad mint, they do not reappear. A large number of coins appear in all the three metals from the mint Urdū Z¨afar Qarīn (lit. camp associated with victory) bearing the date alf. 14
The numismatic evidence of a gaping hole in coin production is at odds with the textual evidence. If the gap of years in numismatic evidence is real and the Mughal mints actually closed, why were mint officials instructed in 1582 to supply newly struck coins to the treasurer and revenue collectors as part of an elaborate plan to expand the monetised tax base and streamline currency circulation through discounts levied on old and underweight coins?
The ashrafi, rūpiya and copper money (murādī) that is minted should be brought by the officials in charge of the mint before the custodian of the imperial treasury who should obtain in exchange coins of previous years, rupees and jalālī, so that the revenue collector (karorī), treasurer and moneychanger (ṣarrāf) change new [coins] with the old for the purpose of discount according to the following rates that have been decreed. 15
One such mint official was the chronicler Bāyazīd Bayāt, who actually held his appointment as the superintendent (dārogha) of the Fatehpur Sikri mint in 1585, when the city, together with Agra, was the capital of the Mughal Empire, and who has left us a record of his reminiscences. 16
The textual evidence itself, however, resolves the mystery of coinage. In an important passage of his secretly written history of the Mughal Empire, Akbar’s courtier and critic, ‘Abdu’l Qādir Badāūnī, explained Akbar’s motive for an extraordinary decision while describing the events that took place in 1581–82 (990 Hijri):
Having thus convinced himself that the thousand years from the prophethood of the apostle, the duration for which Islam (lit. religion) would last, was now over, and nothing prevented him from articulating the desires he so secretly held in his heart; and the space (basāt̤) became empty of the theologians (‘ulamā) and mystics (mashā’ikh) who had [so far] carried awe and dignity and no need was felt for them; he [Akbar] felt himself at liberty to refute the principles of Islam, and to institute new regulations, that were obsolete and corrupt but considered precious by his pernicious beliefs. The first order which was given was that on all coins be written alf (dar sikka tārīkh-i alf navīsand) and the Tārīkh-i Alfī [History of the Millennium] be written from the demise (riḥlat) of the Prophet.
17
There are two important points in the above passage. First, Akbar reckoned the duration of Islam to be of 1,000 lunar years from its advent (612
Without the benefit of Badāūnī’s information, all alf coins would be naturally attributed to the year 1000 Hijri (1591–92
Numismatic and textual evidence, thus, makes it clear that Akbar’s decisions to mint the alf coins and commission the Tārīkh-i Alfī were based on a new interpretation of the terminal dates of the Islamic millennium. The evidence does not explain the source of the idea or the reason for persisting with the same date on the imperial coinage year after year. Elsewhere I have argued that Akbar was inspired in his innovations by a religio-political philosophy called Nuqt̤awiya [Pointism], which was Islamic in orientation and Persianate in character and preached distinctly unorthodox notions of being and time. The proponents of ‘pointism’ visualised time and the progress of humanity in terms of cycles of eras and the leadership of a messiah in each millennium of the era. According to Badāūnī, who found the doctrine repulsive, Akbar was convinced of being the promised man of the millennium (shakhṣ-i ma‘hūd). 19
The Nuqt̤awīs reckoned the duration of Islam from its origin rather than the year of hijrat. The time span between the first year of the advent of Islam and 990 Hijri constituted 1,000 lunar years and was fitted with Islamic millenarian beliefs. The calculations performed by Maḥmūd Pāsikhānī, the founder of Nuqt̤awiya, marked 990 Hijri as the year of the ‘greatest conjunction’ of two superior planets, Saturn and Jupiter, which took place every 960 solar years and precipitated epoch-making events. Significantly, there was also a belief among sixteenth-century Nuqt̤awīs that the effects of this conjunction would extend from 990 Hijri to coincide with 1000 Hijri. 20 Akbar may have followed the logic of the Nuqt̤awī doctrine that 990 Hijri symbolised the beginning of an end and that the apocalypse would work through the decade and take its full effect after coinciding with the alf of the Islamic calendar. Therefore, each year after 990 Hijri was essentially an alf year until the date in the Islamic calendar came round. The purpose of minting alf coins year after year can be ascribed to this piece of the Nuqt̤awī dogma.
There is also a monetary explanation for freezing the numismatic date by Akbar. The Mughal moneychangers (ṣarrāfs), who controlled the banking and exchange business, levied a discount (Persian ṣarf, Hindi batta) on the legal tender of full weight and fineness based on the year of mintage. This practice was also followed by Mughal officials mostly in dealing with revenue payments. Akbar’s administration accepted the principle of discount, as evident from the passage quoted above, based on weight rather than age, with the sole exception of silver coins of old mintage of the same emperor (round akbarshāhī rupee). The treasurers were ordered not to levy a discount on an imperial coin (sikka-i muqaddas) if it was of full weight and to realise the discount on other coins of Akbar on the basis of the difference in the weight of the coin (tafāwat-i wazn-i maskūk). 21 The moneychangers were also instructed to levy discounts on imperial coins only on the basis of weight loss in accordance with the schedule of rates issued by the administration. 22 The system of imperial control initiated by Akbar on currency exchange was strengthened by denying moneychangers and revenue officials any opportunity to demand discounts on imperial coins by removing mentions of specific years (all coins being alf coins).
Recoinage Under Akbar and Jahāngīr
The correspondence between textual and numismatic evidence can be best illustrated in the study of recoinage during the reigns of Akbar and Jahāngīr. Recoinage in the Mughal Empire can be classified into many types on the basis of coins delivered to the mint and the mechanism adopted for their withdrawal. The most common was the gradual reminting of coins withdrawn from circulation as a result of loss of weight in wear and tear or clipping and sweating beyond a prescribed limit. As mentioned, the natural loss of weight in usage was acknowledged by the monetary authorities, and coins were allowed to circulate at a discount up to a point. The state had an established policy of collecting at the time of revenue payment such underweight issues as had exceeded the official limit, and the officials of the various departments were instructed to coordinate their efforts to implement the policy. 23 The second type of recoinage was undertaken by the recalling of demonetised specie through a state decree. In 1592 (1000 Hijri), the year in which the minting of alf coins was discontinued, an imperial order declared all the precious metal coins of previous rulers to be legally invalid. 24 Since these coins could no longer be used to pay for goods and services, even at a discount, they could only be sold as bullion to the moneychangers or to the mints. In the guidelines issued to the treasurer and the police chief (kotwāl), a clause referred exclusively to the demonetisation of the coins of previous rulers. In these instructions, as in the imperial order of 1592, the coins were to be treated at the value of uncoined bullion. 25 The rulers mentioned in these official decrees were most likely the late Delhi Sultans and Afghan kings as well as regional rulers whose kingdoms had been annexed by Akbar and whose silver and billon coins still circulated in the Mughal Empire. Recoinage by devaluing unwanted coins was an important means to weed out old currencies and circulate new ones, and achieve standardisation. In the state sector, the revenue collector, treasurer and mint officials were crucial in effecting recoinage. The list of suppliers of monetary metals to Akbar’s mint included merchants who specialised in selling billon coins of old mintage (kuhn maskūkāt-i misīn-i nuqra āmez). 26
While recurring recoinage was a regular practice, and somewhat easy to implement, the 1592 order of recoinage was difficult for all parties. The Mughal officials used all possible means, including coercion, to ensure compliance. 27 Penalties were devised for offenders, and ṣarrāfs were particularly targeted for their role in giving currency to demonetised coins. The Mughal administration had to wait to give full effect to the recoinage but once it did, the policy signified a landmark in the history of the transition from billon to silver. 28
Numismatically, it is difficult to find evidence for the first type of recoinage. The high points of recurring recoinage were the two seasons of revenue collection during the spring and autumn harvests. 29 These luni-solar moments were not reflected in currency output except perhaps in Akbar and Jahāngīr’s Ilāhī coins, which showed solar months in addition to years. The recoinage of the last decade of the sixteenth century can be investigated using the rich corpus of numismatic data in museum collections and hoards. The British Museum alone has over 1,200 silver coins of Akbar, and other Museums have over 1,800 silver coins. The hoard reports list over 2,600 silver coins of Akbar. 30 The figures show an extraordinary increase in the number of coins in the last three quinquennia beginning with 1591. If the peaks and troughs of the graph represent the mint output and currency circulation during the reign of Akbar, then the increasing number of silver coins must be explained with reference to supplies to the mint. In the studies on mint production and silver circulation in the Mughal Empire, the role of trade and imports of monetary metals has been duly highlighted. 31 The amount of silver arriving in Spain from Mexico and South America (Peru and Bolivia) was the greatest source of silver imported into the Mughal Empire. Not all of American silver came to Mughal India, and an unknown quantity of silver was absorbed in Europe while a significant portion went to China. 32 On the other hand, the Ottoman and Safavid empires, themselves recipients of Euro-American silver, also contributed to the stream of silver flowing towards India. 33 Silver took two routes between the Mediterranean world and India. The first was a combination of maritime and land routes, through the Ottoman and Safavid empires, and the second was the direct sea route around South Africa to the Indian Ocean opened by the Portuguese. The consignments of merchandise and money took a longer journey longer by the second route, but they were the most prolific. On average, it took at least three years for the Spanish–American silver to reach Mughal mints via the maritime–land route, and at least two years via the direct sea route. 34 The time lag will increase if Aziza Hasan’s assumption of five years is accepted in her argument about the impact of American silver on Mughal currency output. 35
According to the estimate based on the registers maintained by the agents of the House of Trade at Seville, the quantity of silver reaching Spain from its American colonies almost doubled from 112 metric tonnes per annum in 1571–80 to 210 metric tonnes per annum in 1581–90 and further increased to 270.7 metric tonnes per annum in 1591–1600. 36 The first increase in silver imports is reflected in the figures in Graph 1 for 1586–90 in hoard specimens, which almost doubled, and in museum collections which too increased though only slightly. This would mean that, with a delay of approximately five years, imported silver began to circulate widely in the Mughal Empire in the form of freshly minted coins. The second increase in silver imports diverges from the figures in Graph 1. While silver imports in 1591–1600 were 128% of those in the previous decade, the volume of coinage in 1591–95 was 183% of the previous quinquennium in hoards and 349% in museum collections. One explanation for this difference is that the coin output in 1591–95 included the remintage of pre-existing stock.
In the early years of his reign, Jahāngīr issued silver coins with new weights and designations known to us from a combination of textual and numismatic evidence. From March 1606, Jahāngīr issued a coin that was 20% heavier (213.6 grains) than the rupee of Akbar (178 grains), memorably called jahāngīrī. In about, 1609, the weight of the jahāngīrī was further increased (222.5 grains) for it to become 125% of Akbar’s rupee and hence called sawāī. 37 In 1611, the newly introduced silver coins were withdrawn, and the standard rupee was restored. 38 Jahāngīr attributed the restoration of the standard rupee to convenience in market transactions even as he admitted his rule not to be as glorious as his father’s to justify the incremental change. 39 By now many types of rupees were in circulation belonging to the previous and current regimes. Even though the weight of the new coins was designed to facilitate exchange, the multiplicity of the coins seems to have caused great inconvenience, and the emperor was forced to consider the continuing chorus of complaints from money users.
The literary sources give us the weight, dates and reasons for withdrawal of the heavy issue, whereas physical specimens of coins allow us to corroborate the given weight and dates. Considered alone, coin evidence throws up an interesting problem. Graph 2 is a time series of Jahāngīr’s silver coins at five-year intervals from the first regnal year to the twentieth. The last two years are shown separately to keep the graph close to the intervals. The figures in the graph may be considered broad indicators of silver currency circulation in Jahāngīr’s reign. The number of coins in the first five years will have to be inflated by 20%–25% to make it comparable. The graph shows an increase in the second and third quinquennia relative to the first (1606–10) quinquennium, and a decrease in the fourth (1621–25). The accession of an emperor was normally accompanied by the coining of new issues and in Jahāngīr’s case, this was through the introduction of his heavy-type rupees. It is unusual that the first five years of his reign should be underrepresented by more than two times in museum collections and more than three times in hoard specimens compared to the subsequent period. There are three possible explanations for this phenomenon. First, during the early years of Jahāngīr’s reign, people used Akbar’s rupees, which were available in greater abundance even though there was a discount on the old coins. Second, the decision to coin the standard rupee in 1611 was accompanied by the order for reminting the heavier issues. Although not all previous issues were reminted and some obviously survived, as seen from the graph, this could at once explain the low volume of output in the first five years followed by the highest peak of all times in the second. Third, keeping in mind that the state was the largest but not the only contributor to the money supply, merchant suppliers to the mint were withholding the fresh coining of stock pending a decision to restore the regular rupee, and once this was taken all of the accumulated bullion was sold to the mint. The three explanations are not mutually exclusive, and it is possible that all three factors took effect in different measures or that any one of them took effect in greater measure.
There is yet another issue about the pattern of circulation of silver currencies in Jahāngīr’s reign that we might consider here. A deficit in imperial income, placed by a chronicle of Shahjahan’s court in the region of 8 million rupees per annum, compelled Jahāngīr to draw upon the silver hoard left by Akbar of 100 to 130 million rupees (1,136–1,477 metric tonnes of silver).
40
Much money was spent from the inherited imperial hoard and Jahāngīr’s son and successor, Shahjahan, had to find ways to rebuild the treasury.
41
The silver withdrawn by Jahāngīr from the imperial treasury could either be spent directly or after the conversion of old rupees into new ones at the mint. The latter course of reminting could have saved the administration market discount levied on old issues that was higher than the brassage.
42
However, it seems that Jahāngīr had to spend Akbar’s money directly. In 1622