As India’s instant payment tech, UPI, conquers new international markets, it evokes a sense of déjà vu in those of us who study the history of money. Today, countries like Singapore, France, the UAE and Sri Lanka are using the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) to simplify trade. In centuries past and under the colonial apparatus, the rupee was used for much the same reason. Even until the 1960s, you could take your rupees and spend them in the Gulf countries, just like you would at home.
The history of how the national denomination of India originated, circulated and was consolidated to emerge as a ‘global’ currency is fascinating. The rupee is widely believed to be an ‘invention’ of Sher Shah Suri (ruled 1540-1545), the Afghan sultan of Delhi and founder of the short-lived Suri kingdom, although the etymology of the word ‘rupiah’ itself can be derived from the Sanskrit rupa or rupya, which meant either ‘fashioned/wrought silver’ or ‘a form or impression’.
Suri organised coinage into two denominations: the silver rupiya weighing one tola or 11.66 grams and the copper dam, weighing 20 grams. Forty copper dams made a silver rupiya. The sultan then established mints across his kingdom, which ensured sufficient flow of coins for use, and mandated that the states under him would make and receive payments in coins, rather than commodities.
A painting of Sher Shah Suri from a manuscript of Tarikh-i-Khandan-i-Timuriya
Sher Shah Suri’s silver rupee from the Pandua mint — AH 947, 1541 CE, double die struck. | Photo Credit: Sarmaya Arts Foundation
Worth its weight in silver
It was the sagacity and foresightedness of Akbar (ruled 1556-1605) that ensured the rupee’s position as a pre-eminent Mughal currency. Akbar continued with Suri’s reforms and monetary policies. When he expanded the empire of Hindustan from Kabul to Chittagong and from Kashmir to the Deccan, he set up mints across this vast expanse. Traders could trust that coins from Mughal mints would be of consistent weight and purity, so this form of currency became popular across the subcontinent. Incidentally, it was during Akbar’s reign that the word ‘rupiya’ first appeared on Indian currency.
Akbar’s silver rupiya from the Agra Mint — double die struck, AH 1011, 1603 CE. | Photo Credit: Sarmaya Arts Foundation
The bulwark of Mughal currency was a steady supply of silver brought to India by trade-hungry Europeans in the 16th century. In order to buy spices, gems and textiles, the British, Dutch, Danish and French ‘East India Companies’ had to turn their silver into a currency that was trusted and accepted everywhere. Enter the rupee. By the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the Companies made the Mughal rupee a ‘trade coin’ — it was exported to territories under their control, such as Sri Lanka and Indonesia, and used in local circulation. The design of the rupee became so familiar in these countries that when they started minting their own coins, they kept the distinct Mughal imprint, complete with Farsi inscriptions.
Akbar, ink on paper, painted by William Daniell, engraved by T. Garner, 1837 | Photo Credit: Sarmaya Arts Foundation
A Dutch East Indies rupee at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford | Photo Credit: Shailendra Bhandare
Guilelmus II, a silver double rupee of German East Africa — 1893 AD, double die struck. | Photo Credit: Sarmaya Arts Foundation
From Africa to the Gulf
In the 19th century, European powers launched currencies in the colonies to further their own agenda. Since the rupee had already been a familiar trade currency on the East African coast, the newly established colonies of German and British East Africa, Italian Somaliland and Portuguese Mozambique all started to issue their own ‘rupees’. The British enforced treaties to make the rupee legal tender in the Arab sheikhdoms of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the ‘Trucial States’ (the forerunners of modern UAE) and the Sultanate of Oman.
A one rupee note issued for use in the Gulf | Photo Credit: Sarmaya Arts Foundation
In fact, in 1956, the Reserve Bank of India launched a series of special notes to circulate exclusively in the Gulf. It was only in the 1960s, when the rupee was severely devalued, that the Arab kingdoms abandoned it and launched their own currencies. The last to abandon the Indian rupee was Oman in 1972. But five decades on, in 2022, things came full circle when the Sultanate embraced another Indian money innovation: a tech-enabled echo of the historic original called Rupay.
The writer is curator of South Asian and Far-eastern Coins and Paper Money at Ashmolean Museum, the U.K.
The fifth in a series of columns by sarmaya.in, a digital archive of India’s diverse histories and artistic traditions.
