the saints of kashmir were once represented on the coin make a report
Answers
IN the writing and teaching of ancient Indian history, coins have been perhaps the least exploited source, and numismatics has remained a rather sequestered discipline in terms of the incorporation of its insights into mainstream works. If this is so for the general histories written of mainland India, where coins are either “added and stirred” or, for the most, relegated to a section on “economic history”, as if that is all they could tell us, it is as true for works on Jammu and Kashmir. Indeed, the ancient history of this northern-most State of India is, by and large, a hazy grey area. Not because a large number of scholars, Indian and European, have not applied themselves to the task of elucidating it since the mid-19th century but because the bulk of these, especially since the 1970s, contented themselves with relying on, or rather duplicating, the contents of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, that iconic Sanskrit text celebrated (somewhat erroneously) by modern historians as the first and only work of true history written in the ancient subcontinent. While the rich and systematic information this text contains is not to be scoffed at, that alone cannot justify literal readings of the text standing in for an interpretive history of the ancient land.
Further, the archaeology of Jammu and Kashmir that could have moved forward seems to have lagged instead. That is why we do not have a connected and coherent material picture of ancient Kashmir. This is a sorry state of affairs for a region that was once studied by the likes of Aurel Stein and R.C. Kak. The former’s efforts (1900) have been defining for Kashmir studies, but it is the latter’s steady documentation of the monumental remains of Kashmir (1933) and of the archaeological and numismatic galleries of the State’s museums (1923) that established a benchmark for practitioners of local archaeology. Unfortunately, however, it remains that even a century after Kak wrote, surprisingly unsurpassed and unextended.
It is to redress this lacuna that Iqbal Ahmad, as he tells us in his introduction, decided to put together his Kashmir Coins. A senior archaeologist in the Jammu and Kashmir State Archives and Museums, Srinagar, he is indeed uniquely positioned to have undertaken such a venture, namely, creating a consolidated record of currencies in the entire State. The currencies span the earliest monetary era to the 20th century although the subtitle to the book leads one to expect only the ancient period. The value of such a collection is instantly obvious: It provides the reader an opportunity to gain a longue dur e e perspective not only on the coins found in the State but on the associated historical changes or continuities that Kashmir has known abundantly.
This comes out clearly from Ahmad’s notes accompanying the images of coins. For he divides and classifies these, as is the common practice, according to the dynasties that issued them. So one is able to trace the issues by the Indo-Greeks, Shakas, Indo-Parthians, Kushanas, Kidaras and Hunas, through the Karkota coins, and those of the later “Hindu Rajas”, as he rather curiously terms and impatiently bunches together major historical kings (and separate dynasties) of early medieval Kashmir such as Didda, Kalasha, Harsha, and Jayasimha. He then moves onto the “Sultans”, the Shahmeris, Chaks and Mughals, followed by the Durranis, Sikhs, and finally the Dogras.
The temporal sweep of the collection is, therefore, impressive and true to its claim; spatially, however, the subregions of Jammu and, more so, Ladakh are hardly touched. The treatment of the coinages is also another story. As Ahmad ruefully mentions from time to time, cataloguing of most of the hundreds of coins this book alludes to has simply not been done. His book does not seek to remedy that situation either. Hence, the absence of a detailed context to most of the coins illustrated in the book, especially the ancient ones, such as the find spot of coins even when they were found in a horde, and their quantity (the sparse appendix given does not really help), and where they are housed now. Noticeable also is the absence of a careful organising of the images of coins within a dynasty in such a way as to not confuse their chronology. For a professional historian, this rather erodes the analytical potential of this volume.
Punch-marked coins
The reviewer found this particularly disappointing for the earliest coins found in the Kashmir valley, the punch-marked silver and copper coins, known as pana in ancient Sanskrit and Pali literature (interestingly, the Kashmiri word for money is also pans). Punch-marked coins are considered diagnostic of the spread of civilisation and urbanism in the Gangetic valley and beyond at the dawn of the early historic period in the 6th century BCE.