A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c6.35

c6.35

Closely allied to the evidence of inscriptions on stone and copper is that of the shorter legends on coins. But the coinage of South India ‘presents greater difficulties to the student and offers less reward for his labours than that of the North’. Really ancient coins are rare and contain no dates and few intelligible legends, often only the ruler's name or title; also, the devices upon them are often crude and indistinct. The rectangular pieces of impure silver bearing several punch-marks, the purāṇas (eldlings) of the law books, were common to both Northern and Southern India and certainly belong to the centuries before Christ; copper punch-marked coins were also known, and this type of coinage may be taken to have gone out of circulation about A.D. 200. In later times the principal coinage of the South was struck in gold, not silver; copper was used for smaller denominations. Of gold coins there were generally two denominations: the varāha—perhaps deriving its name from the Chālukya crest of a boar; also called pon, hun, pagoda (from bhagayati?) and pardaos (Portuguese)—usually weighing a kalañju (Molucca bean), or 50 to 60 grains; and the fanam, being a tenth of the varāha, its weight, 5 to 6 grains, conforming to the mañjāḍi. The earliest gold coins are spherules of plain gold bearing a minute punch-mark; a little later came the padma-ṭankas which were thin cup-shaped pieces stamped with punches, at first on one side only and then on both; the gold coins of Rājēndra I and Rājādhirāja I Chola, and of Rājarāja I E. Chālukya, discovered at Dowleśvaram in 1946, are marked and inscribed on one side only; and finally came the die-struck pieces of which the thick, small Vijayanagar pagodas are the best surviving specimens. There was a general preference for small coins and the silver tāres of Calicut, only one or two grains in weight, furnish some of the smallest specimens of coins known.