India and Indian Coins

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Obverse of 1882 Portugese India Rupee

Reverse of 1882 Portugese India Rupee

Ancient India
India prior to British rule was a collection of different civilisations, states and cultures. Hinduism, the largest religion in India today is thought to have originated in the Punjab region of India in around 1500 BC during the late Bronze Age, making it one of the oldest religions still practised today, eventually spreading over most of the territory of modern-day India. The lands in the Upper Ganges plain were divided amongst many tribes that gradually consolidated until they became kingdoms in their own right. Buddhism, another ancient religion, was established by the Buddha in North Eastern India in around the 5th Century BC. Jainism, another native Indian religion, first emerged in organised form in around the 9th Century BC. All of these native religions share a belief in reincarnation.
India was almost united (apart from the southern tip) by the Maurya Empire, which lasted from the late 4th Century BC until the early 2nd Century BC. In 327 BC, this Empire made contact with Alexander the Great, who conquered the Taxilia region and would probably have attempted to conquer the entire sub-continent had his men not revolted and refused to follow him any further East. In the succeeding years, the descendants of some of Alexander's soldiers settled in the Indus region and formed the Indo-Greek Kingdom of Bactria, although this kingdom only touched the north-eastern peripheries of Modern India and mostly lay within the territories of modern-day Pakistan.
The Roman Empire was known to have traded with the peoples of India, via the famous spice roads that lay between the Roman Empire and the subcontinent, although this trade was often disrupted during times of war between Rome and the Parthian/Persian Empires, which lay between India and Rome.
When the Maurya Empire declined, India broke up once again into various independent principalities, kingdoms, states and smaller empires, including the Indo-Parthians, Kushans, Indo Sassanids, Rais, Shahis, Kharavelas, Guptas, Vakatakas, Gurjars, Palas, Hoysalas, Mysore amongst many other empires and kingdoms who rose and fell during the 'Middle Kingdom' Period, lasting until the 16th Century.

Mughals, Sikhs and Marathas Confederates
The Mughals, descendants of Islamic Mongols, swept into India from central Asia in the early 16th Century, led by Babur, the first Mughal Emperor. The Empire grew in strength, and from its base in north-western India extended its power and influence over much of India. This hegemony was challenged by the Hindu Maratha confederates however, who emerged in 1674, and gradually fought back against the Mughal Empire.
Meanwhile, in the Punjab region, the Sikhs, enveloped within the Mughal Empire, began to assert themselves as a military power in their own right.
By the early 18th Century, the Mughal Empire was in decline and the Maratha Confederacy was in its ascendency. However, it was the context of a declining Mughal Empire and a rising, but very decentralised Maratha Empire that the Europeans, and in particular the British, began to play their own part in the power struggles for dominance in India.

The East India Company
The East India Company was originally founded in 1600, with a remit to engage in trade with the Indians. The company negotiated with the Mughal Emperors for exclusive trading rights in places like Surat, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta, building factories protected from attack by fortresses. Other European powers, notably the French, who established themselves in Pondicherry, the Portuguese, who established themselves in Goa, and the Dutch, who established themselves on the island of Ceylon, to the South East of the Indian peninsula. These European powers frequently squabbled amongst themselves as well as local Indian powers for power and influence in India.
The Company's trading and manufacturing operations in India were very profitable, and jealously guarded by the Company's own private army of mercenaries, whose soldiers, native and British alike, were generally better paid and treated than their regular British Army counterparts.
During the 7 Years War, the Company won a stunning victory at Plassey over the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies that all but ended French influence in India, and led to the annexation of all of Bengal by the Company. Throughout the rest of the 18th and Early 19th Centuries, the Company, aided at times by British regulars, conquered Indian states such as Mysore who dared to defy the Company's or Britain's interests, and absorbed them. Those princely rulers who submitted to the company were allowed to remain in place provided that their policies did not conflict with those of the Company.

Indian Mutiny and the End of the East India Company
The East India Company administered its holdings over India, backed up by its mercenary army of British and sepoy (native) troops until the mid-19th Century. However, the introduction of new type of cartridge, rumoured to be greased with cow or pig fat (and thus offensive to both Hindu and Muslims) led to a sepoy revolt in 1857 that was only put down with the greatest of difficulty and brutality with the aid of British Crown forces, who avenged mutineer atrocities, both perceived and real, with a terrible ferocity.
Thereafter, the British government decided that the company could not be trusted with maintaining order and took over the administration of the company's holdings in India the following year. The company was reduced to managing the tea trade, until it was finally wound up in 1874*.

The Raj
From 1858, Britain ruled India directly, although in many ways, India resembled a separate country (albeit one in vassalage) rather than a mere colony. India possessed its own government institutions, civil service and armed forces administered by the Viceroy and the local legislature and were in most respects not ruled directly by London. The colonial government introduced British-style legal reforms and institutions that largely remain in place today. However, towards the end of the 19th Century, Indian nationalism started to grow in strength, led by the Indian National Congress, a political party which was founded (ironically enough) by an Englishman, the grandly-named Allan Octavian Hume in 1885.

Agitation for Independence
The British educated Indian elite was at the forefront of a nationalist campaign for further autonomy or independence from the British, and perhaps the leading figure for this was Mahatma Gandhi, a barrister and pacifist (although he had once served as a medic in the British Army during the Boer War). Although much of the agitation for Indian Independence was made within the context of keeping India within the British Empire as a largely independent dominion (like Canada or Australia), attitudes towards the British hardened following the Amritsar Massacre of 1919.
In the wake of riots two days before, during which some Britons were beaten to death by Indian mobs, Brigadier Reginald Dyer, supported by the Irish Lt-Governor of Punjab Michael O'Dwyer, gave savage and vengeful orders for British and sepoy soldiers to fire deliberately into the crowds assembling in Amritsar for a festival. As a result, several hundred Indians were massacred, and Dyer, although relieved of his command for his actions, avoided criminal prosecution and was viewed as a national hero by some sections of the British public and press.
Up until the end of World War One and the Amritsar Massacre, Gandhi had supported a policy of encouraging Indian participation in British affairs to earn respect for Indians in the eyes of the British. However, now he encouraged a policy of non-cooperation, involving boycotts, non-payment of taxes and promoted self-reliance (refusing to buy British goods in favour of natively-produced alternatives).
By the end of World War II, it was clear that in the long-term, British rule over India was no longer viable.

Partition of India
British India became independent in 1947. However, it did not gain its independence as a united country. Tensions between Hindu and Muslim nationalists had risen in the years preceding independence, and by the 1930s, Muhammad Jinnah, a prominent Muslim member of the INC, was advocating a separate state for Muslim Indians.
And so, as India moved towards independence at the end of World War II, it was decided to divide India. Muslims would get their own state called Pakistan (split into two parts, with part of Bengal forming East Pakistan) separate from the Hindu-dominated core. In the days leading up to independence, thousands were killed in religious riots as Hindus fled from future Pakistan and Muslims fled from the future Hindu-dominated independent India.

Modern Indian History
India absorbed the princely states that had previously enjoyed a great deal of autonomy under British rule and forcibly (in some cases) integrated them within the Union of India. A republic was declared in 1950, severing the last institutional links with Britain. Much of the 20th Century centred around conflicts with Pakistan, mostly based around the issue of Kashmir, a Muslim majority state whose non-Muslim Maharajah (princely ruler) had signed an agreement of accession to India rather than allow his realm to be absorbed by Pakistan.
As a result, India and Pakistan have had very poor relations and have fought four wars, in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999. Both have developed nuclear weapons as a deterrent against the other.
India was officially non-aligned during the Cold War, although it did maintain very cordial relations with the USSR and sourced much of its military hardware from the Soviet Bloc. Since largely abandoning socialism at the national level in the early 90s, India has become one of the fastest growing economies in the world, although poverty and illiteracy remains a problem.

Coinage of India
Coinage has existed in India since at least the 5th Century BC, pre-dating the rise of the Mauryan Empire. The arrival of the Greeks and the founding of the Indo-Greek Kingdoms in the Indus region influenced the style and design of many coins struck by Indian rulers throughout India for many years afterwards.
Extensive trade links with the Roman Empire (where demand for Indian spices was high amongst the wealthy) are evidenced by large hordes of Roman coins that have been discovered as far as southern India, often found defaced or counter-marked for local use.
The Kushan Empire, a partly Hellenised Empire originating from Bactria, was a prolific issuer of coins and helped to spread the use of Kushan-style coinage throughout most of India from the 1st until the 4th century AD.
The rupee, India's currency today, was first introduced as a medium-sized silver coin weighing approximately 175 grains troy (or 11.34 grams) in the early 16th Century by Sher Shah Suri, who founded a short-lived Empire known as the Sur Empire around Delhi. Although this Empire was conquered only 17 years after its foundation in 1557, the conquering Mughals adopted the rupee system, which eventually spread to other Indian states as well. The rupee was originally divided into 16 annas, or 64 paise or 192 paise until it was decimalised in 1957 (subdivided into 100 new paise).
The East India Company issued its own coins during the time of its rule of India, often featuring the company logo on the obverse. From the 1830s, coins featuring portraits of William IV, and later Victoria were issued by the company.
After direct British rule had been established in 1858, the British attempted to introduce sterling coinage based on the gold standard, but this was a failure, and the silver-standard rupee currency was maintained throughout the existence of the British Raj. The rupee did however, become widely adopted by other British colonies and protectorates in the Gulf and parts of Africa.
A scandal erupted in 1911 when the reverse of the rupee was redesigned for the new King-Emperor George V, featuring an elephant which resembled a pig, leading to riots amongst the enraged Muslim community. The coin was hastily redesigned as a result to make it clearer that the animal was in fact an elephant.
No regal coins were issued with a date later than 1947 (they were struck after independence up until the declaration of a republic in 1950 however). The new coins struck for 1950 were similar in design except for the replacement of the King's portrait with the Asoka Lion Capital logo.
High inflation has rendered coins below 50 paise virtually worthless, and today, coins of 50 paise, 1, 2, 5 and 10 rupees are typically issued for circulation. A new symbol for the rupee (as the £ sign is to the pound), was introduced in 2011.
*Interestingly, the company was recently 're-founded' using the same name and a similar logo, trading in luxury goods with an Indian connection.

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