The division of the rupee into 8 fanams of 24 kásh survives, or did survive till quite recent years, in the French settlements of Pondichery, &c. The reason alleged was that the anna is non-existent as a coin. But it is curious that the French administration did not discover that there was a decimal system connected with the rupee. For in Southern India thirty years ago, and perhaps at the present day, the pysa was = 1/3 anna and the half-pysa 1/6 anna, but these were always reckoned among the people as 1/50 and 1/100 rupee.[[37]] To the people of the South the rupee is divided into 5 fanams each of 10 pysa each of 3 kásh. But the term kásh (kássu) is merely a name for the lowest coin. The E.I.C.’s pysa of 1808 bears the Persian inscription Bis kás chhar fleūs ast (It is 20 kásh, 4 filūs), followed by ‘XX cash.’ So this coin, so dear to the people of Southern India that they cannot look on the modern quarter-anna (the Anglo-Indians’ ‘pice’) otherwise than as a mookal, a 3/4 pysa, is really 20 kásh, and the rupee is 200 filūs or 1000 kásh. Here is a decimal division ready for the rupee, for the half-pysa, nominally 1/96 rupee (in 1797 coins it is so inscribed ‘96 to one rupee’), but 1/100 rupee in the bazaar, is similarly inscribed as of ‘10 kásh 2 filūs.’ So the rupee could easily be made of 10 fanams, 100 lesser pysa, 1000 kásh. But the sexdecimal division into annas, and the duodecimal division into pies, are too convenient to be given up for a decimal system.
The 2 filūs of the half-pysa show that the pysa was once divided into 4 of a small coin (the present pie), the fils, an Arabic word probably representing the L. follis.[[38]]
Indian Gold Coinage
Northern and Central India, the parts more immediately under the Mogul empire, were silver-standard countries. The silver rupee (sicca, = 192 grains) was the standard; and the golden rupee of the same weight, called an Ashráfi, or gold mohur, was valued at 16 rupees, though generally more, according to the market-value of gold. The E.I.C. continued to strike gold mohurs, with halves, thirds and quarters. Other gold coins were current, notably the Venetian zechin, and the approximate correspondence of this coin to the quarter-mohur caused the latter to be commonly known as a ‘chick.’[[39]]
Southern India offers the curious instance of a gold-standard country (a century ago) having changed to a silver standard. The pagoda has disappeared in currency. The beautiful Farūki pagoda of Tippoo is still to be found; and the Venetian zechin with its archaic design, never changed since it was first struck in the thirteenth century, is highly esteemed in the household treasuries of affluent Indians for its great purity. The word zechin or sequin is derived from sikkah, ‘coin.’ The usual Persian inscription on the Mogul coinage, continued by the E.I.C., is Shah Alam, bádshah gházi, sikkah mubárak (Shah Alam, king victorious, coin auspicious).[[40]]
4. Decimal Currency
It is scarcely necessary to describe the decimal systems of which the Dollar currency is the type. They have some advantages in numeration with the counterbalancing defects of all decimal series. Division of the dollar stops at a quarter; then there is a drop to 10 cents, and that coin has no quarter. Any thirding can only be approximate.
[35]. Clipping the pennies, against which crime frequent statutes threatened punishment, affected the poor who paid and were paid by tale, not by weight. It afforded a pretext for occasionally raiding the Jews and plundering their store of coin, always found of course to have been clipped.
[36]. ‘Twenty-four carat’ was taken as the standard of pure gold because the Roman gold solidus weighed twenty-four carats (each 1/144 of an ounce). The assayer’s carat is 1/24 part divided into four assay-grains. Medieval gold coins such as Edward III’s noble and the Venetian zechin, always of the same quaint pattern, were generally twenty-three carat 3-1/2 grains fine, = 995 parts in 1000. But this nearly pure gold being very soft, it became customary to alloy the metal with a certain amount of copper to give it the hardness necessary for trade purposes in modern times.