Coins in India: Power and Communication

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This volume focuses on the socio-cultural connotations of coinage in terms of power, authority, and rule legitimization, placing numismatic studies in the context of cultural history. Coins function as money, because the users share cultural parameters regarding their value and acceptability. These cultural values form a continuum and are reflected in adhering to traditional designs in the old and new denominations, while at the same time introducing changes and modifications. It is this continuum that marks Indiaâ€™s coinage tradition of over 2,500 years, with inputs from Greek and Islamic coinage systems. An important facet of the aesthetic of Islamic kingship, for example, is evident from the silver coinage of the Bengal Sultanate, which combined intricate interdependence of religious expression, personal aggrandizement, and rule legitimacy, Coins provide insights into political power and authority, while archaeological excavations, hoards, and stupa deposits provide contexts that place coin-finds within a larger cultural milieu. The contributors to this volume discuss this tradition from several disciplinary perspectives such as history, archaeology, economics, and numismatic studies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Himanshu Prabha Ray

Himanshu Prabha Ray is associate Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she has taught since 1980. Her publications include Monastery and Guild: Commerce under the Satavahanas, Oxford University Press, 1986; The Winds Change: Buddhism and the Maritime Links of Early south Asia, Oxford University Press, 1994 (reissued as Oxford India Paperbacks, 1998); The Archaeology off Seafariing in Ancient South Asia, Cambridge University Press, 2003. In 1996, she jointly edited with Jean-Ffrancois Salles a volume titled, Tradition and Archaeology: Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean, Manohar, 1996. another volume Archaeology of Seafaring: The Indian Ocean in the ancient Period, was published in the Indian Council of Historical Research Monograph Series I, New Delhi, 1999.