Karshapana

The karshapana (Sanskrit kārṣāpaṇa, Pali kahāpaṇa) was the standard silver coin of ancient India, made by stamping small symbols with separate punches onto a piece of silver of fixed weight. These punch-marked coins appeared in the Gangetic plain and the north-west from around the 6th–5th century BCE, were issued by the states known as the Mahajanapadas, and reached their widest circulation under the Maurya Empire.

The name was also applied to copper coins in later centuries, and the karshapana, often shortened to pana, served as the main unit of account in Indian texts on law, administration and religious discipline.

The name derives from karsha, a unit of weight. Indian weights were based on the rati, the seed of the gunja plant, which weighs a little over 0.1 g. The silver karshapana was reckoned at 32 ratis, giving a theoretical weight of roughly 3.3–3.5 g, and surviving coins cluster around that figure. Legal texts also call the silver coin purana or dharana, and the Manusmriti describes a copper karshapana of one karsha weight.

Before coins, Indian exchange relied on barter, weighed metal and, for small values, cowrie shells, which remained in use as small change long after coins appeared.

The earliest Indian coins are difficult to date precisely. Bent silver bars from the north-west, and cup-shaped and broad, thin punch-marked pieces from states such as Gandhara, Kashi, Kosala, Avanti and Magadha, followed different weight standards and designs. Hoards from Afghanistan and Taxila that also contain Greek coins help to date some of these issues to the 4th century BCE or earlier. Whether Indian coinage arose independently or was prompted by contact with the coin-using world of the Achaemenid Persians, who ruled Gandhara in the 6th–4th centuries BCE, is debated; Indian punch-marked coins look very different from the Lydian and Greek tradition.

The best-known karshapanas belong to the imperial series associated with Magadha and the Maurya Empire (c. 322–185 BCE). These coins usually carry five punches on the obverse, typically including a sun symbol and a six-armed symbol, with other marks such as hills, animals or trees varying from group to group. The reverse is often blank or carries one or more small marks, possibly applied by officials or money-changers. Many Mauryan-period coins contain a substantial share of copper, so their silver content is lower than their appearance suggests, an early form of debasement.

The Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft traditionally linked to the Mauryan court though compiled over a long period, uses the pana to express wages, fines and prices and refers to a state mint. Buddhist canonical texts likewise use the kahapana as the common measure of value.

Alongside silver, copper coins circulated widely: first cast and punch-marked pieces, then die-struck coins of cities and local rulers. In this later period the word karshapana was often used for a copper coin, and the silver punch-marked series gradually gave way to die-struck coinages. These included the silver drachms of the Indo-Greeks, the coins of the Indo-Scythians and the gold of the Kushans. Old punch-marked coins nonetheless stayed in circulation for centuries and turn up in hoards of the early centuries CE.

The karshapana is the starting point of Indian coinage and a key source for the economic history of early India. The long reliance on silver of fixed weight foreshadowed later Indian money, and the modern word rupee, as in the Indian rupee, comes from Sanskrit rūpya, a term for wrought silver. The karshapana's role as a medium of exchange across many states also shows how a shared weight standard could support trade in a politically divided region.

• British Museum – Collection online
• American Numismatic Society