Collecting Coins and Reconstructing India’s Past in Colonial India: British and Indian Perspectives

Colonial assumptions about the unreliability of written sources to study India’s past resulted in British officials using monuments and objects to reconstruct their own narrative of India’s history. In these endeavours, coins were considered as particularly valuable objects. They became the evidence through which British collectors and scholars tried to write a reliable history of India. 

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the age when British fascination with ancient Greece was a common phenomenon, British collectors stationed in India hunted frenziedly for Indo-Greek coins, attempting to find the material remains of Alexander’s invasion of India. In Punjab and the northwest, colonial conquest that is the recent British annexation of Punjab in 1849, opened the wealth of the local bazaars and gave British army officers access to the coins found in the region. Their hunt for these coins increased their monetary value and they became highly collectable, with skilled forgeries starting to appear in the bazaars. My paper first examines British collectors’ coin-collecting activities in this region and showcases the networks of collectors and scholars that came together to advance the study of Indo-Greek numismatics in colonial India.

On the other hand, in eastern India, circumstances were favourable for the involvement of local Indian actors in the enterprise of coin collecting through regional archaeological surveys, provincial museums and learned societies. While continuing to use coins as their primary sources, these Indian coin collectors and scholars, turned to the history of the Guptas and Mauryas to argue that India too had a glorious past that flourished in the ancient period, characterising it as the golden age of India. 

This paper thus demonstrates that British and Indian coin collectors appropriated and interpreted coins in their own frameworks and thus contributes to a reevaluation of the value of numismatics in India. 

Shreya is a third-year doctoral researcher working on the AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Project “Decolonizing Collections: Investigating Knowledge Formation Networks in Colonial India with special reference to Numismatics” at the University of Exeter and the Ashmolean Museum. This project looks at the history of four collections of Indian coins currently held in the Ashmolean, the British Museum, and the Fitzwilliam. Named after four British male coin collectors, we know little about the Indian actors who helped them in assembling these coin collections. The project thus has two strands, bringing out the role of local Indians in the history of coin collecting in colonial India and researching knowledge formation networks in the period. Shreya is interested in the history of collecting and provenance research, and has undertaken placements at the Ashmolean and the V&A.  

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