Mughal Coinage and Monetary Exchange

From Babur’s 1526 conquest of northern India to the end of Mughal dynastic rule in 1857, money in Mughal South Asia took several forms. Gold mohurs, silver rupees and copper dams circulated beside written account units and credit. A coin’s inscription identified a ruler or mint, but people also weighed and tested the metal and compared its local exchange value.

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Rupees, mohurs and dams

The silver rupee was introduced under Sher Shah Suri, who ruled the Sur dynasty from 1540 to 1545 during the interruption of Mughal rule. The Ain-i Akbari, an administrative account compiled by Mughal court historian Abu’l Fazl under Akbar, describes the round rupee as eleven and a half mashas, a weight unit, and says Akbar refined its standard. Gold mohurs served high-value exchange and copper dams made smaller payments. The Ain reckons a dam as one-fortieth of a rupee, while noting that the rupee’s market price could vary; it says officials nevertheless used the forty-dam value when calculating salaries.

This distinction mattered in everyday counting. Akbar’s accountants could divide a dam into twenty-five jitals, but Abu’l Fazl calls that an imaginary division used by accountants, not a coin. In 1721 in Dhar, a town in central India’s Malwa region, Hamir Chand recorded borrowing 2,240 rupees from Mir Muhib Allah and promised to repay the loan within a year. A tamassuk, a written acknowledgment of debt, recorded receipt and repayment terms; qadi Muhammad Mustafa, an Islamic judge, marked it with his seal.

How an Akbar-era mint made a coin

Abu’l Fazl’s account describes a workplace in which several specialists handled the metal before a coin was struck. An assayer, or sairafi, estimated fineness, the proportion of precious metal in an alloy. For gold, workers drew a streak on a touchstone beside streaks made by reference needles bearing gold of known purity; the marks had to be drawn with similar pressure for a fair comparison. Silver could be filed, bored and heated, then judged by its colour and behaviour. These tests let the mint sort and refine metal whose appearance alone could mislead.

After refining, metalworkers cast bullion, uncoined metal valued for its content, into ingots. A cutter called the zarrab sheared them into round blanks about the size of coins. An engraver cut the inscription and design into steel dies, engraved stamps that formed the coin’s faces. At the striking bench, a worker placed a blank between two dies and a hammerer struck it so both faces received an impression. The mint’s supervisor coordinated the work, the accountant kept a daily record of expenses and the treasurer watched the receipts. Abu’l Fazl’s fee schedule shows that this work had quantified fees tied to output: the blank-cutter received 53 dams and 8¾ jitals for cutting the weight of 1,000 rupees into rupees, while the striker received 5 dams and 9½ jitals for striking that weight. The mint account therefore recorded both the metal and the labor that turned it into coin.

The mint list in the Ain gives a late-sixteenth-century snapshot of this network. Gold, silver and copper were struck at four principal centres, while ten additional towns struck silver and copper and twenty-eight more struck copper only. Akbar’s officials thus combined a small number of full-service mints with a wider network producing copper for smaller exchanges.

Weight, purity and exchange

Akbar’s court changed its valuation rules as officials dealt with worn coins. Abu’l Fazl describes an earlier schedule in which a full-weight square rupee counted at forty dams, an older full-weight round rupee at thirty-nine and a more worn round example at thirty-eight. Coins below the accepted weight were treated as bullion and valued for their metal. In 1592 Akbar changed the rate for a full-weight round rupee to forty dams and set deductions for lighter pieces. He also instructed treasurers and revenue collectors not to demand a particular kind of coin from taxpayers: they could tender the coin they had, with any deficiency in weight or purity charged at the current rate and no more. This rule connected coin testing to the amount a payer actually owed.

A sarraf (money changer and assayer) helped make such differences manageable by testing and exchanging coins at an accepted rate. In Mughal India sarrafs also operated in credit: historian Najaf Haider describes them as assayers and money changers who served rulers, village communities, nobles and merchants, while some acted as bankers, receiving deposits, advancing loans and transferring funds through bills of exchange called hundis.

Inscriptions and the reach of imperial authority

Jahangir’s silver coin dated 1618 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art replaces the usual written month with Gemini. The museum explains that the zodiac sign corresponds to the month in which the coin was struck, rather than serving as a talisman. The British Museum also catalogues a gold coin struck at Surat in 1626 under Jahangir and Nur Jahan, his wife and empress. A Sarmaya description of a 1624 Agra silver rupee reports Jahangir’s order on the obverse and Nur Jahan’s name on the reverse.

By the mid-eighteenth century, Mughal titles still appeared on coins struck far from the imperial court. The British Museum catalogues a silver rupee of Ahmad Shah Bahadur, struck at Multan, now in Pakistan, between 1748 and 1754; it weighs 11.480 grams.

From Mughal-style rupees to Company coinage

In 1717, the Mughal emperor granted the East India Company permission to strike rupees in the Mughal style at Bombay, now Mumbai. The Company’s rupees continued to use that format until British India’s currency was standardized in 1835. The new Company rupee placed William IV’s portrait and the Company’s name where Mughal inscriptions had appeared, and gave its denomination in Persian. Historian G. Balachandran notes that some three hundred distinct coinages were said to be current across the subcontinent when the standard Company rupee appeared in 1835.

The uprising of 1857 ended Mughal dynastic rule. In 1858, the Company’s Indian territories passed to direct Crown rule; historian G. Balachandran reports that more than one hundred native states still claimed the right to issue their own coins at that transfer.