14. The Sunār as money-changer
Formerly Sunārs were employed for counting and testing money in the public treasuries, and in this capacity they were designated as Potdār and Sarāf or Shroff. Before the introduction of the standard English coinage the money-changer’s business was important and profitable, as the rupee varied over different parts of the country exactly as grain measures do now. Thus the Pondicherry rupee was worth 26 annas, while the Gujarat rupee would not fetch 12½ annas in the bazār. In Bengal,[18] at the beginning of the nineteenth century, people who wished to make purchases had first to exchange their rupees for cowries. The Potdar carried his cowries to market in the morning on a bullock, and gave 5760 cowries for a new kaldār or English rupee, while he took 5920 cowries in exchange for a rupee when his customers wanted silver back in the evening to take away with them. The profit on the kaldār rupee was thus one thirty-sixth on the two transactions, while all old rupees, and every kind of rupee but the kaldār, paid various rates of exchange or batta, according to the will of the money-changers, who made a higher profit on all other kinds of money than the kaldār. They therefore resisted the general introduction of these rupees as long as possible, and when this failed they hit on a device of marking the rupees with a stamp, under pretext of ascertaining whether they were true or false; after which the rupee was not exchangeable without paying an additional batta, and became as valuable to the money-changers as if it were foreign coin. As justification for their action they pretended to the people that the marks would enable those who had received the rupees to have them changed should any other dealer refuse them, and the necessities of the poor compelled them to agree to any batta or exchange rather than suffer delay. This was apparently the origin of the ‘Shroff-marked rupees,’ familiar to readers of the Treasury Manual; and the line in a Bhāt song, ‘The English have made current the kaldār (milled) rupee,’ is thus seen to be no empty praise.