Administrative System of the Marathas c11.s4.12

c11.s4.12

Shivaji had no good mechanic to work his mint. The irregular shape of the coins and the misshapen alphabets of the legends show the crude method of their manufacture. The writer of the Bombay Gazetteer⁴⁴ gives the following account of the working of the Chandor mint, closed in 1830. "A certain quantity of silver of the required test was handed over to each man who divided it into small pieces, rounded and weighed them, greater care being taken that the weights should be accurate than that size should be uniform. For this purpose scales and weights were given to each of the 400 workmen, and the manager examined them every week. When the workmen were satisfied with the weight of the piece, they were forwarded to the manager who sent them to be stamped. In stamping the rupee an instrument like an anvil was used. It had a hole in the middle with letters inscribed on it. Piece after piece was thrown into the hole, the seal was held by a workman called *batekari*; and a third man gave a blow with a six pound hammer. Three men were able to strike 2,000 pieces an hour, or 20,000 in a working day of ten hours. As the seal was a little larger than the piece, all the letters were seldom inscribed." The Chandor mint was opened long after Shivaji's demise. But that the description holds good with respect to Shivaji's mint also, can be proved by a simple inspection of Shivarai coins. The small Shivarai Hon in the museum of the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal, for example, lacks the compound letter "tra" in the word Chhatrapati, evidently because the little circular piece had originally been hammered on a seal of much larger size.