The Commercial Coinage of Koch Kingdom with Notes on the Seals, Medals, Non-judicial Stamps and Banking (An Old and Rare Book)

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The progress in Indian numismatic studies in recent times has come as a crucial corrective to the concept advanced by the colonial lustoriography that the pre-colonial economy in the subcontinent, particularly in peripheral regions like the Northeast, was grossly in barter and that the introduction of the East India Company's money was responsible for the monetization of economy. The same approach also earned some acceptability for the invented myth that the coins issued by the rulers of the local kingdoms were basically commemorative medallions. The sustained work of the numismatists now establishes that the indigenous coins were in circula-tion as medium of exchange for both short and long distance trade and commerce. Thus, the Harikela coinage of Northeast India of the ancient period have been recovered in such large quantities and these lowly valued metal pieces of various denominations with identical design. symbol and legend had so many regional series casted in a large number of local mints that the issuance of the comage could not be for anything but to meet the demand for facilitating the commercial transactions. Similarly, the Koch coinage of the medieval period was also largely commercial, though a small segment of the large number of issues and their staggering quan tities was for commemorative purposes. In fact, the Cooch Behar kingdom was endowed with enormous commercial advantage by its crucial strategic location in a very large geographical area well connected by surface and navigable routes and consisting of the eastern, north-eastern and the sub-Himalayan regions that together formed a special economic zone for subcontinental and trans-Himalayan trade in ancient and medieval periods. The Cooch Behar coins - popularly known as Nārāyani were in circulation in all those areas as it is evident from the discovery of hoards of such coins in different places, while in Bhutan. Sikkim and Garo hills these were considered as the only acceptable currency. No wonder, immediately after the annexation of a part of the Garo hills a British officer had reported that the Garos refuse to accept any money other than Narayani. The Cooch Behar coins were also accepted in the government treasuries in Assam for many years after British annexation and the government notified from time to time the exchange values of such coins vis-a-vis those of the East India Company issued from the Faridabad mint. The demand for the supply of coins in and outside Cooch Behar in the medieval period is evident from the largeness of the quantity discovered. One hundred and fifty die vartory of the coins of Narananyana ford from the Cooch Behar munt is interpreted to suggest that at least fifteen lakh coms were struck during the reign of that ime single king. The coins are available of the time of almost all the Cooch Behar kings. The denominations of full. half and quarter is another indicator of the commercial scale of the coinage manufacturing. The other medieval states in Northeast India, like Ahom, Dimasa, Tripuri, Manipuri and Jaintia kingdoms, also seem to have minted coins for both commemorative and commercial purposes The mumismatists have established the practice of countermarking the coins of one state in another to validate them for the purpose of commerce The Commercial Coinage of Kock Kingdom (With Notes on the Seals. Medals. Non-juiberal Stomps and Banking) by S. K. Bose is his latest in a series of commendable works on ancient and medieval coinage of Northeast India that has already earned him the reputation of a scholar of numismatic studies with significant contributions in the field. Besides the compre hensive elucidation of numismatic details of the commercial coins of the Cooch Behar State which is the main thrust of the book, the author has added to its great worth by adding the notes on seals, medals, non-judicial stamps and banking in separate chapters. Like his earlier books, the present work also contains a large number of hitherto unexplored and unexposed materials, including archival records, in its appendices that are abundantly useful for further studies in the subject and for reinforcing the economic history dimension of numismatics. The reproduction of an article on coins of Islam Shah and another on rare coins of Lakshminarayana of Cooch Behar by the eminent numismatist Late Nicholas Rhodes, who was a co-author of Bose in their many joint publications, is indeed a sign of the author's rare clarity of thought in selection of material for the unique relevance of those articles to the crucial issues at stake in mainstream discourses in the book The book is the product of sustained research put in by the author for many years as data had to be gathered in bits and pieces from various collections and unorganized repositories and to analyse those to provide an integrated narrative in a chronological format. The author did it with admirable patience and a deep understanding of the role coinage played in material culture. The book is indeed a significant contribution to numismatic study as well as a window to regional economic history. An understanding of the divide between pre-monetized and mon-etized economies and the occasional localized coexistence of the both in pre-industrialized and pre-capitalistic societies in precolonial India are among the crucial issues that makes a study of this nature an important window for gaining useful insights and questioning the polemics of colonial modernization as well as the theories of unchanging east. The presence of barter economy in the region till nineteenth century is undoubtedly supported by a host of proven sources of history as highlighted in various studies, but the fact of a steady growth of money economy over a long period of time is systematically explained in this book in light of numis-matic evidences. The readers will certainly appreciate the work for breaking new grounds in numismatic studies and widening the scope of such studies towards understanding society and economy over time and space. The Commercial Coinage of Koch Kingdom The medieval Koch kingdom, or the Cooch Behar State during the British regime, which covered some parts of the modern northern division of West Bengal and the lower region of Assam, occupied an enviable position in the trade map of the north-eastern division of the Indian subcontinent, as it did, between the Mughal province of Bengal, on one end, and the north-eastern kingdoms and tribal territories, including the Ahom State (Assam) and the Hima layan kingdoms of Bhutan, Sikkim and Nepal, on the other, and commanding the traditional trade routes of the subcontinent to Tibet and China The Mughal policy in the northeast frontier was, therefore, for a long time, directed towards opening up of the Tibetan and the Chinese trade through Cooch Behar. Due to its unique advantages of location, Cooch Behar in the medieval period enjoyed a monopoly in trade by controlling the trans-Himalayan trade routes through Bhutan. It also controlled the trade between Bengal and Assam as well as Bihar and Assam, as the entry point to Assam by the Brahmaputra river route was within its ambit. The navigable Brahmaputra was the main artery of commerce in the northeast The use of this route was mentioned by Al Idrisi as early as AD 1162 The land route that connected the Koch kingdom for entry to Assam was either via Murshidabad. Malda and Dinajpur through Rangpur or from Dacca to Singimari via Dhamrai and Jamalpur. However, both these land routes were impassable during monsoons. Nonetheless, in connection with an annual fair at Dhubri, in Goalpara district in Assam, the Deputy Commissioner of Goalpara, in a notification dated 5" September, 1875, in the Assam Gazette, had drawn attention of the traders to the routes con-necting Dhubri, which is the present gateway of Assam, with Bihar and Bengal. Three land and river routes were suggested viz. (a) North Bihar to Dhubri via Purnia, Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar, (b) Rajmahal to Dhubri via Malda, Dinajpur and Rangpur and (c) river route from Goalanda (Now in Bangladesh) to Dhubri via Brahmaputra. Needless to say, this notification of the Deputy Commissioner of Goalpara is indicative of the continuation of the Assam-Bengal trade through Goalpara, which was indeed voluminous in the medieval period and formally regulated from both sides".

S. K. Bose was born in Assam, India. An ex-banker, he was appointed by his employer as Secretary to the Coin Cabinet of the Bank. This re-fuelled his childhood fascination in history and antiquities. With the passage of time his fervent passion was translated to a deeper academic interest. A visiting faculty of the Centre for Archaeological Studies and Training, Bose is at present the Executive Trustee of the Institute of NorthEast India Studies, Kolkata. He is associated with a number of organisations at both regional and national levels devoted to history and numismatics. Several research papers and books on numismatics highlight his expertise and have earned him eminence as an authority on North East India coinage at both national and international levels. He has been awarded the prestigious Akbar Medal by the Numismatic Society of India for his contribution to numismatic literature.