A coin historian

From a banker turning into a renowned numismatist, Shankar Kumar Bose’s journey is a fascinating one, as Ranjita Biswas finds out
Kolkata-based Shankar Kumar Bose was a banker when coins from ancestry suddenly made a call and he was enticed, and he then started on a whole new path. At the ripe old age of 87, writer of many books on numismatics, he is still at it, researching, writing and is as enthusiastic as ever in new areas of exploration. Currently, he is collecting documents on the ‘token’ banks used to give customers while they waited for service, something now forgotten in the digital age, for his book A Historical Journey of Bank Tokens.
It is quite interesting how Bose, who is originally from Assam, has stepped into the world of coins.
Excerpts of an interview:
From an administrative officer in a PSU bank how did you step into the world of coins?
I was an administrative officer with SBI in Shillong when the bank had participated in a programme celebrating the Jubilee Year of Cherrapunji’s Ramakrishna Mission’s educational institution. The bank decided to put up a stall titled ‘Story of Money in India’ along with other institutions, to attract visitors. I was given the responsibility of curating the collection. I went through many volumes in the (then) Central Library in Shillong – and I was hooked. The exhibition was a great success; even the governor commented on it when he visited there. Perhaps I found my vocation.
You have a wide collection of Assam’s Ahom age coins. How did you collect them?
The Ahom kings minted coins liberally. The earliest coins issued by an Ahom ruler is dated 1648 A. D. consisting of silver coins and gold mohurs. In many villages in Sivasagar, Jorhat, etc., where the Ahoms had their capital at different times, many households still had them, but they were unaware of their significance. On my tours I explored those areas, visited jails which often hold the booty of thieves and sniffed around when a house was demolished because at many times they throw up coins ensconced underneath. For my collection, some I bought, some the householders gave voluntarily.
In my book The Coinage of Assam (Volume II) Ahom Period, written in collaboration with Nicholas G. Rhodes of Britain, an internationally acclaimed numismatist, I have written about them.
However, you also say that the Ahoms were not the first kings to mint coins in Assam
Yes. Many scholars till recently assumed that metallic coinage was introduced in Assam only from the 17th century by the Ahom kings but through my sustained research since 1994, I have found that since the 9th century metallic copper coins were introduced by the Mlechchha dynasty of Salastambha about which I have written in The Coinage of Assam, Volume I
You also say that a coin in Agartala led you to discover a royal lineage
Sometimes it happens quite unexpectedly in our field of work. We were holding an exhibition there at the government’s initiative; it was a huge success. I found out about a king in the adjacent Samatata region, now in Bangladesh, almost accidentally. One day a person came to me bringing an old coin to verify. Even through the mud sticking to it, I could make out it was very old and espied a name Balabhatta. There was not much material I could find about a king or minor raja in that area. But research led me to a king called Rajbhatta in the post-Gupta period and there was a copper plate in his name. I am not an expert, but I surmised this coin was from that period and this king belonged to that reign.
There’s also an interesting book written in Bengali on the coins used in tea gardens during the British period in Assam
Yes, they were separate from the other coins in use at that time. The tea garden labourers had to be paid in cash daily or at the end of the week and there was lack of small value currency specially as the state’s treasury was greatly denuded after the Burmese invasions in waves that ended in 1826 after the British drove them away from Assam. The road system was not good enough to transport coins from Calcutta (Kolkata). So, the tea planters had to take their own measures and created their own tokens.
You also used to collect historical books and journals on the North East. What of them?
Yes, I did, often scouring the second-hand book stalls on College Street and around the Reserve Bank of India in the Dalhousie area.
What’s in the pipeline?
I am compiling data on indigenous banks during the British period. Most of them died down later or morphed into PSU banks like the State Bank of India, which is rooted in the Bank of Bengal, changing into the Imperial Bank in colonial times.
In Assam, the individual bank tradition goes back to 1899 when a bank named Assam Bank and Commercial Company was established in Dibrugarh. In Shillong I have found reference to a bank called Banking Corporation of India established in 1901.
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