Candy (unit)

Much of our knowledge of the values of South Asian mass units comes from an 1821 study ordered by the British East India Company and subsequently published as Kelly's Oriental Metrology,[6][note 1] although the approximate value of 500 pounds for the candy is attested as early as 1618.

The three Presidencies of British India had already undertaken a fair degree of standardisation of weights and measures by the time of Kelly's study.

In Bombay itself (present-day Mumbai), a separate value of the candy was recorded for "grain", equal to 8 parahs or 358 lbs.

At the British East India Company trading station of Anjengo, (near modern-day Kadakkavoor[12]), the candy was equal to 35 telong and fixed at 560 lbs.

[10] Although not a part of the Central Provinces region, the unusually high value recorded for the candy in Baroda, Gujarat (modern-day Vadodara) – 892 lbs.

The candy in Surat, the main port of Gujarat, is also consistently quoted as being much larger than the same unit further south.

[1][2] It is impossible to accurately convert this to modern units given the huge variability in the different values of the bigha in different locations.

In particular, Kelly's 1821 study of South Asian metrology is completely silent on land measures in the Bombay Presidency.

Molesworth defines the Marathi bigha (बिघा, bighā) as equal to twenty pandas (पांड, pāṇḍa) or to 400 square kathys (काठी, kāṭhī), but also notes that it varies in different districts.

This would make the bigha roughly 2500 square yards, or half an acre, in agreement with measurements in other areas of India.