Fig. 7. The Kalima in ornate Arabic script on early tankah of Altamsh.
In earlier chapters we have seen how the Greek, the Śaka, the Pahlava and the Kushāṇa invader each in his turn modified the contemporary coinage of Northern India; the conquests of Muḥammad G̱ẖ̱orī wrought a revolution. The earlier Muhammadan rulers, it is true, conceded so much to local sentiment as to reproduce for a time the Bull and Horseman issues of the Rājpūt states, and even to inscribe their names and titles thereon in the Nāgarī script, but there was no real or lasting compromise; the coinage was too closely bound up with the history and traditions of their religion. Their issues in India are the lineal descendants of those of earlier Muhammadan dynasties in Central Asia and elsewhere. The engraving of images was forbidden by the Faith; and accordingly, with some notable exceptions, pictorial devices cease to appear on Indian coins. Both obverse and reverse are henceforth entirely devoted to the inscription, setting forth the king’s name and titles as well as the date, in the Hijrī era,[45] and place of striking or mint, now making their first appearance on Indian money. The inscribing of the sovereign’s name on the coinage was invested with special importance in the eyes of the Muslim world, for this privilege, with the reading of his name in the khutba, or public prayer, were actions implying the definite assumption of regal power. Another new feature was the inclusion in the inscription of religious formulæ, that most commonly used being the Kalima or profession of faith. “There is no god but Allah, and Muḥammad is the prophet of Allah.” This practice, followed by many subsequent Muhammadan rulers in India, owed its origin to the crusading zeal of the early Khalifs of Syria in the eighth century.
The fabric of the coinage thus underwent a complete transformation; not all at once, but gradually, as new districts were subjected to Muhammadan conquerors, money of the new type spread over the whole peninsula except the extreme south. Yet owing, no doubt, to its sectarian association, it was not, until the great Mug̱ẖal currency had attained a position of predominating importance, voluntarily imitated by independent communities.
The Muhammadans were also destined to set up a new standard of weight, but before this was accomplished nearly five centuries were to elapse. The period under discussion in this chapter is chiefly interesting for the reappearance of silver in the currency, due to the reopening of commercial relations with Central Asia, and for the successive attempts made by various sovereigns to restore order out of the chaos into which the coinage had fallen during the preceding centuries. The gold and silver currency was rectified by Altamsh and his successors with little difficulty; but the employment of billon for their smaller money was fatal; for the mixture of silver and copper in varying proportions,[46] so liable to abuse, proved in the end unworkable as a circulating medium; and not until Sher Shāh substituted pure copper for billon, and adjusted this to his new standard silver coin, the rupee, was the currency established on a firm basis.
The earliest Muhammadan kingdom in India was set up by ’Imādu-d-dīn ibn Qāsim, in Sind, in A.D. 712, but as it exerted little influence on its neighbours, the insignificant coins issued by its later governors need not detain us. The gates of the North-West were first opened to Muslim invaders by the expeditions of the great Sult̤ān Maḥmūd of G̱ẖ̱aznī between the years A.D. 1001 and 1026. In 1021 the Panjāb was annexed as a province of his dominions, and after 1051 Lāhor became the capital of the later princes of his line, driven out of G̱ẖ̱aznī by the chieftains of G̱ẖ̱or. Here they struck small billon coins with an Arabic legend in the Cufic[47] script on the reverse, retaining the Rājpūt bull on the obverse. Maḥmūd himself struck a remarkable silver tankah[48] at Lāhor, called on the coin Maḥmūdpūr, with a reverse inscription in Arabic, and his name and a translation of the Kalima in Sanskrit on the obverse.
The last of these G̱ẖ̱aznavid princes of Lāhor, Ḵẖ̱usrū Malik, was deposed in 1187 by Muḥammad bin Sām of G̱ẖ̱or (Mu’izzu-d-dīn of the coins), who, after the final defeat of Pṛithvīrāj of Ajmer and his Hindu allies at the second battle of Thāṇeśar or Tarāin, in 1192, founded the first Muhammadan dynasty of Hindustān, which nevertheless actually starts with his successor, Qut̤bu-d-dīn Aibak, the first Sultan to fix his capital at Dehlī. In dealing with the coins of the five successive dynasties who ruled in Dehlī from 1206 to 1526, it will be convenient to recognize three periods: (1) from the accession of Qut̤bu-d-dīn Aibak in 1206 to the death of G̱ẖ̱iyās̤u-d-dīn Tug̱ẖlaq in 1324, (2) the reign of Muḥammad bin Tug̱ẖlaq 1324-1351, (3) from the accession of Fīroz Shāh III, 1351, to the death of Ibrāhīm Lodī, 1526°.
(A.H. 602-725)
The gold coins which Muḥammad bin Sām struck in imitation of the issues of the Hindu kings of Kanauj with the goddess Lakshmī on the obverse, are, except for the earliest gold issue of Ḥaidar ’Alī of Mysore, without a parallel in Muhammadan history. He apparently struck no silver for his Indian dominions; in fact, two centuries of invasion had so impoverished the country that for forty years the currency consisted almost entirely of copper and billon: hardly any gold appears to have been struck, and silver coins of the earlier Sultans are scarce. The third Sultan, Altamsh[49] (1211-1236), however, issued several types of the silver tankah (Pl. VIII, 2), the earliest of which has a portrait of the king on horseback on the obverse. The latest type bears witness to the diploma of investiture he had received in 1228 from the Khalif of Bag̱ẖdād, Al-Mustanṣir. The inscriptions run as follows: on the obverse, “In the reign of the Imām Al-Mustanṣir, the commander of the faithful,” and on the reverse, “The mighty Sultan Shamsu-d-dunyā wā-d-dīn, the father of the victorious, Sultan Altamsh.” Both legends are enclosed in circles, leaving circular margins in which are inscribed the name of the mint and the date in Arabic. This type was followed, sometimes with slight variations, by seven succeeding Sultans, and although the Khalif actually died in 1242, the words, “in the reign of,” were not dropped until the time of G̱ẖ̱iyās̤u-d-dīn Balban (1266-1286). Gold, though minted by ’Alāu-d-dīn Mas’ūd, Nāṣiru-d-dīn Maḥmūd, Balban and Jalālu-d-dīn Ḵẖ̱iljī, was not common until ’Alāu-d-dīn Muḥammad (1296-1316) had enriched his treasury by conquests in Southern India. These gold coins (Pl. VIII, 5) are replicas of the silver in weight and design. Divisional pieces of the silver tankah are extremely rare. ’Alāu-d-dīn, whose silver issues are very plentiful, changed the design by dropping the name of the Khalif from the obverse and substituting the self-laudatory titles, “The second Alexander, the right hand of the Khalifate”; at the same time he confined the marginal inscription to the obverse. His successor, Qut̤bu-d-dīn Mubārak, whose issues are in some respects the finest of the whole series, employed the old Indian square shape[50] for some of his gold, silver and billon. On his coins appear the even more arrogant titles, “The supreme head of Islām, the Khalif of the Lord of heaven and earth.” G̱ẖ̱iyās̤u-d-dīn Tug̱ẖlaq was the first Indian sovereign to use the title G̱ẖ̱āzī, “Champion of the faith.”
Among the greatest rarities of this period are the silver tankahs of two rois fainéants, Shamsu-d-dīn Kaiyūmars̤, the infant son of Mu’izzu-d-dīn Kaiqubād (1287-1290), and Shihābu-d-dīn ’Umar, brother of Qut̤bu-d-dīn Mubārak, who each occupied the throne only a few months.
Most of the coins struck in billon by these early Sultans, including Muḥammad of G̱ẖ̱or, are practically uniform in size and weight (about 56 grains), the difference in value depending upon the proportions in which the two metals were mixed in them. This question has not yet been fully investigated, but it is probable that different denominations were marked by different types.[51] The drawback to such a coinage lay, as already noted, in the impossibility of obtaining uniformity in coins of the same denomination, and in the consequent liability to abuse. Numerous varieties were struck. The Indian type known as the Dehlīwāla, with the humped bull and the sovereign’s name in Nāgarī on the reverse, and the Dehlī Chauhan type of horseman on the obverse, lasted till the reign of ’Alāu-d-dīn Mas’ūd (1241-1246); on some coins of this class Altamsh’s name is associated with that of Chāhada-deva of Narwar. Another type, with the Horseman obverse and the Sultan’s name and titles in Arabic on the reverse (Pl. VII, 3), survived till Nāṣiru-d-dīn Maḥmūd’s reign,[52] when it was replaced by coins with a similar reverse, but, on the obverse, the king’s name in Arabic appears in a circle surrounded by his titles in Nāgarī (Pl. VIII, 4). On the commonest type of the later Sultans Arabic legends are in parallel lines on both obverse and reverse. The billon coins of ’Alāu-d-dīn Muḥammad are the first to bear dates. Qut̤bu-d-dīn Mubārak employs a number of special types, including those square in shape (Pl. VIII, 6). Billon coins, mostly of the Bull and Horseman type, were also struck by a number of foreigners who invaded Western India during the thirteenth century. The most important of these was the fugitive king of Ḵẖ̱wārizm Jalālu-d-dīn Mang-barnī.
The earliest copper of this period is small and insignificant. Some coins, as well as a few billon pieces, bear the inscription ’adl, which may mean simply “legal,” i.e. currency (Pl. VIII, 1). Balban introduced a type with the Sultan’s name and titles divided between obverse and reverse. All copper is dateless.
The mint names inscribed on the coins of these Sultans sometimes afford valuable historical evidence of the extent of their dominions. The general term, Bilādu-l-hind, “The Cities of Hind,” is the first to appear, on the silver of Altamsh. Dehlī is found on the same king’s billon and copper. Lakhnautī, the modern Gaur in Bengal, also occurs for the first time during this reign; Sult̤ānpūr, a town on the Beas in the Panjāb, on a silver tankah of Balban; Dāru-l-islām, “The seat of Islam” (possibly an ecclesiastical mint in old Dehlī); and Qila Deogīr on the gold and silver of ’Alāu-d-dīn Muḥammad; while Qut̤bābād is probably Qut̤bu-d-dīn Mubārak’s designation for Deogīr.
A.D. 1325-1351
(A.H. 725-752)
Faḵẖ̱ru-d-dīn Jūna, on his coins simply Muḥammad bin Tug̱ẖlaq, son and murderer of G̱ẖ̱iyās̤u-d-dīn Tug̱ẖlaq, has not unjustly been called by Thomas “The Prince of moneyers.” Not only do his coins surpass those of his predecessors in execution and especially in calligraphy,[53] but his large output of gold, the number of his issues of all denominations, the interest of the inscriptions, reflecting his character and activities, his experiments with the coinage, particularly his forced currency, entitle him to a place among the greatest moneyers of history. For his earliest gold and silver pieces he retained the old 172·8 grain standard of his predecessors. His first experiment was to add to these, in the first year of his reign, gold dīnars of 201·6 grains (Pl. VIII, 7) and silver ’adlīs of 144 grains weight, an innovation aimed apparently at adjusting the coinage to the actual commercial value of the two metals, which had changed with the influx of gold into Northern India after the Sultan’s successful campaigns in the Deccan. But the experiment evidently did not work; for after the seventh year of the reign these two new pieces were discontinued.
Muḥammad bin Tug̱ẖlaq’s gold and silver issues, like those of his predecessors, are identical in type. One of the earliest and most curious of these was struck both at Dehlī and Daulatābād (Deogīr), his southern capital, in memory of his father. It bears the superscription of G̱ẖ̱iyāṣu-d-dīn accompanied by the additional title, strange considering the circumstances of his death, Al Shahīd, “The Martyr.” His staunch orthodoxy is reflected on nearly all his coins, not only in the reappearance of the Kalima, but in the assumption by the monarch of such titles as “The warrior in the cause of God” and “The truster in the support of the Compassionate,” while the names of the four orthodox Khalifs, Abūbakr, ’Umr, ’Us̤mān and ’Alī now appear for the first time on the coinage of India. The early gold and silver, of which about half-a-dozen different types exist, were minted at Dehlī, Lakhnautī, Satgāon, Sult̤ānpūr (Warangal), Dāru-l-islām, Tug̱ẖlaqpūr (Tirhut), Daulatābād, and Mulk-i-Tilang. In A.H. 741 (1340) Muḥammad sent an emissary to the Abbassid Khalif at Cairo for a diploma of investiture, and in the meantime substituted the name of the Khalif Al Mustakfī Billah for his own on the coinage; on the return of the emissary, however, it was discovered that that Khalif had actually died in A.H. 740, so during the latter years of the reign the name of his successor, Al Ḥākim, appeared in its place (Pl. VIII, 8).
At least twenty-five varieties of Muḥammad bin Tug̱ẖlaq’s billon coinage are known. From inscriptions on the Forced Currency, which included tokens representing these billon pieces, we learn the names of their various denominations. There appear to have been two scales of division, one for use at Dehlī, and the other for Daulatābād and the south. In the former the silver tankah was divided into forty-eight, and in the latter into fifty jaitils. At Dehlī were current 2-, 6-, 8-, 12- and 16-gānī pieces, equal respectively to ¹/₂₄, ⅛th, ⅙th, ¼th and ⅓rd of a tankah. At Daulatābād there were halves (25 gānī) and fifths (10 gānī). The assignation of their respective values to the actual coins is, however, still a matter of difficulty.[54]
Billon as well as pure copper coins of the later years of the reign bear the names of the two Khalifs. About twelve types[55] of copper money were minted, most of them small and without special interest. Between the years A.H. 730-732 (1329-1332) the Sultan attempted to substitute brass and copper tokens (Pl. VIII, 9) for the silver and billon coinage. In order to secure the success of this experiment, he caused such appeals as the following to be inscribed on them: “He who obeys the Sultan obeys the Compassionate”; and it is significant that one of these tokens bears an inscription in Nāgarī, the sole example of the use of this script by the orthodox Sultan. These coins were struck at seven different mints, including Dhār in Mālwā, but the scheme was doomed because of the ease with which forgeries were fabricated; they were made in thousands; the promulgation of the edict which accompanied the issue “turned the house of every Hindu into a mint,” says a contemporary historian. The Sultan thereupon withdrew the issue, and redeemed genuine and false alike at his own cost.
(A.H. 752-932)
It has been suggested by historians that the disastrous consequences of Muḥammad bin Tug̱ẖlaq’s experiment with the currency were in part responsible for the disintegration of his wide empire. This is improbable. His successor, Fīroz Shāh Tug̱ẖlaq, undoubtedly inherited a full treasury, as the vast constructional works he undertook during the thirty-seven peaceful years of his reign prove. But he was no soldier; and the governors of the wealthy Deccan province probably experienced little interference from the distant Court at Dehlī. Daulatābād was an almost impregnable fort, and, doubtless, well stored with munitions. Consequently truculent Viceroys had the sinews of rebellion ready to their hand. The temptation was too great to be resisted. Other governors followed the lead given in the Deccan; the finest provinces rapidly fell away during the disturbed rule of Fīroz’s successors and became independent kingdoms; so that in a few years the dominions of the Dehlī kings were reduced to little more than the district round the city.
Their discomfiture was completed when, in 1398, the plundering hosts of Tīmūr swept down through Hindustān and occupied the capital. Under these conditions the coinage naturally degenerated.
The gold of Fīroz Shāh is fairly common, and six types are known. Following his predecessor’s example, he inscribed the name of the Khalif Abū-l-’abbās and those of his two successors, Abū-l-fatḥ and ’Abdullah, on the obverse, and his own name on the reverse, accompanied by such titles as “The right hand of the commander of the faithful” (i.e. the Khalif) and “The deputy of the commander.” The latter appears on either the copper or billon coins of nearly every subsequent ruler until Bahlol Lodī’s reign. In A.H. 760 (1359) Fīroz associated the name of his son, Fatḥ Ḵẖ̱ān, with his own on the coinage.
Gold coins of subsequent kings are exceedingly scarce (Pl. VIII, 11); the shortage of silver is even more apparent. Only three silver pieces of Fīroz have ever come to light, and a few are known of Muḥammad bin Fīroz, Maḥmūd Shāh, Muḥammad bin Farīd, Mubārak Shāh II, and ’Ālam Shāh. In the reign of Muḥammad bin Fīroz, the general title, “The Supreme head of Islām, the commander of the faithful,” was substituted for the actual name of the Khalif in the inscription. Fīroz Shāh, following the example of Muḥammad bin Tug̱ẖlaq, issued in large quantities a billon coin of about 144 grains weight (Pl. VIII, 10). This was continued by his successors, but the proportion of silver was apparently gradually reduced. The coinage of the later rulers, though abounding in varieties, is almost confined to copper and billon pieces (Pl. VIII, 12). During the whole period, with but two exceptions, one mint name appears, Dehlī, accompanied by one or other of its honorific titles, Ḥaẓrat or Dāru-l-Mulk.
The long reign of Fīroz seems to have established his coinage as a popular medium of exchange; and this probably accounts for the prolonged series of his posthumous billon coins, extending over a period of forty years. Some of these and of the posthumous issues of his son, Muḥammad, and of his grandson, Maḥmūd, were struck by Daulat Ḵẖ̱ān Lodī and Ḵẖ̱iẓr Ḵẖ̱ān, two sultans who refused to assume the insignia of royalty. The coinage of the Lodī family, Bahlol, Sikandar and Ibrāhīm, despite the difference in standard, bears a close resemblance to that of the Sharqī kings of Jaunpūr. The first and the last minted copper and billon, Sikandar and his son, Maḥmūd, a pretender (1529), billon only. Bahlol (1450-1489) issued a large billon coin, the Bahlolī, of about 145 grains (Pl. VIII, 13), and also a copper piece of 140 grains, first introduced by Fīroz, with its half and quarter divisions. The mint name, Dehlī, appears on both Bahlol’s and Sikandar’s coins, but it is frequently missing from the latter, as the dies were made larger than the coin discs. The name Shahr Jaunpūr, “The City Jaunpūr,” occurs on the later copper of Bahlol after his reduction of the Sharqī kingdom in 1476. On their billon coins all three kings adopt the formula, “Trusting in the merciful one,” but on his larger copper pieces Bahlol retained the old, “Deputy of the commander of the faithful.” In 1526 Ibrāhīm Lodī was overthrown and killed on the field of Pānīpat by the Mug̱ẖal Bābur; and once again the fortunes of the Indian coinage changed under the auspices of a foreign dynasty.