Jital coin

The bull-and-horseman design (see images at right and below) was copied and adapted by subsequent Hindu and Muslim Medieval authorities in the territories corresponding to modern Afghanistan, Pakistan, North West India and eventually beyond.

[2] The jital, issued in vast numbers, perhaps hundreds of millions, by the Hindu Shahi, is credited with expanding the geographic reach of a monetized economy in Medieval India.

[3][4] Valued for their reliable silver content, bull-and-horseman jitals were circulated along trade routes from their Afghan source to northeastern Europe.

An early 15th century Ilkhanid ambassador to Vijayanagar (Karnataka) reported three types of coin in use there: gold alloy, pure silver and copper jital.

[20][21] On the Shahi prototype, the obverse face of the coin shows a seated humpbacked Zebu bull with a Sharada script legend above with a dotted border.

Spalapati means "war-lord" (from Persian spala, army + Sanskrit pati, master) and Sāmanta, "governor" or "feudatory lord," thus the coins reference generic titles rather than specific persons, despite the possible existence of a Hindu Shahi king called Sāmand (c. 850-870 CE).

[28] The image of the sacred bull, communicating virility and power, amplifies the imputed divinity of the issuing authority and may have meant to assert Hindu sovereignty over their Turk Shahi predecessor or against the encroachment of neighboring Muslim rulers.

[30][31] It would not be the last time that rulers in this contested frontier zone created numismatic self-representation with an eye on powerful neighbors.

Singh argues that the choice of weapons depicted on the coins held a propaganda function, to validate new Turkic rulers and their Islamic regime to the subjugated population.

Issued by both Hindu and Muslim authorities, featuring Indic and Iranic motifs, Persian-Nāgarī bilingual inscriptions, and changing weight systems based on Persian and Indic standards, the jital serves to challenge those scholars who divide transcultural premodern societies and their artifacts into artificially separate categories of Muslim and Hindu periods.

The jital provides material evidence that such fixed and separated categories misrepresent the mobile, fluid, heterogeneous, cosmopolitan, polyglot societies of the South Asian borderlands.

[41] Robert Tye articulates an assessment similar to Flood's last point based on his study of the Indo-Persian jital, arguing that "peoples united in the use of a particular sort of currency are also likely to exchange ideas about how that coinage should be used, changed and developed.

Mukhia (2004) has criticized both communalist and nationalist historians for placing too much emphasis on elites and too much focus on continual cultural conflicts or, alternately, on mutual accommodation, but in both cases inappropriately projecting modern political frameworks and understandings on pre-modern peoples, especially the majority population outside of the ruling classes and their administrators.

The second are "iconoclastic" coins issued by Muslim rulers that contain no pictorial imagery (making images of animate beings is controversial within Islam) but only script and geometric devices.

with a remarkably uniform content of 70 per cent gold and silver with the types in good style, and a reverse legend in cursive script which is faithfully copied but progressively misunderstood.

[68] Kalhana's 12th century Rājataraṅginī provides evidence disputing Al-Bīrūnī's list, maintaining that Kallar is a misreading of the later Kamalaku (Kamalū) and that because Samanta is not known in any other instance as a name, that this is merely a title.

[77] Iltutmish (1192-1236), the founder of the Delhi Sultanate, had been sold into slavery as a boy and later purchased by Ghorid general Qutb ud-Din Aibak (himself the slave of Muhammad Ghori) for 100,000 jitals.

[78] Delhi Sultan Alauddin Khalji (1296-1316) regulated the prices of staple foods and essential commodities to prevent famine, discourage stockpiling, increase tax revenue, eliminate bribery, and insure that his military personnel were paid on time and could afford to live on their salaries.

[82] Kushano-Sasanian coin types struck to Persian weight standards dominated Medieval Indian circulation after the fall of the Gupta Empire in the 6th century.

The ancient Hindu weight system, dating to Mohenjo Daro, was based on the ratti, the poisonous bright red seed of Abrus precatorius.

[86] The early Shahi bull-and-horseman jitals have a consistent weight and high silver content over hundreds of years demonstrating a sound economy and stable political power.

[30] Decreased silver content is often attributed to shortages of bullion but other evidence suggests hoarding by elites motivated by short sighted greed or deliberate attempts to manipulate the economy as likely explanations.

[88][89] Goron (2001) speculates that during the Delhi Sultanate, silver bullion was kept in the treasury while billon, and to a lesser extent copper, were predominantly used in circulating coins.

The Hindu Delhi Rajas, under nine different authorities from two ruling houses (Tomaras, then Chauhan) preserved highly consistent weight, metal content and design types.

Coins struck by the Khwarezmian Empire under Ala-ud-din Muhammad, (1200-1220 CE) and the jitals issued by Genghis Khan appear based on the mithqal, the Persian standard silver weight unit of 4.32 grams.

[92] Tye suggests that variable coin weight may have been a deliberate strategy to destabilize markets to reduce peasants to subsistence levels, pushing them into serfdom.

[94] The Sultanate of Delhi brought a degree of stability with its tri-metallic currency system and a long lasting silver to gold coin ratio of 10:1.

[95] The currency became stabilized in an enduring way when Sher Shah Suri abolished the use of mixed metals and introduced the rupee of 100 rattis (11.40 grams) of 96% pure silver.

[98] The following list of issuers and catalog numbers is based on Robert and Monica Tye's 1995 Jitals: A catalogue and account of the coin denomination of daily use in Medieval Afghanistan and North West India.

[99] The list is supplemented with additional jitals from later catalogues including Steven Album's Checklist of Islamic Coins (2011)[100] and Michael Mitchiner's The coinage and history of southern India: Part 1 Karnataka - Andra (1998).