Article:
India's First Coins: 18th century French solider-scholar may provide some insights
By Vikram Doctor
Economic Times - Aug 5, 2012

Travellers are always interested in money. It is the reason many of them travel, and even if they aren't purely money-minded, they have a practical interest in having enough of it, of the right kind, to survive in the countries they travel to.

Some of the earliest descriptions of money come from travellers, who describe the currencies of the countries they visit, and their relative value, much in the way of backpackers leaving tips on Lonely Planet's popular ThornTree forum about the currency of their destinations.

Traders-cum-travellers like Jean-Baptise Tavernier, who discovered the Hope diamond in India and took it to the West, have left some of the earliest descriptions of Indian money.

But when Shailendra Bhandare, assistant keeper of South Asian coins at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, opened a volume in France's Bibliotheque Nationale imposingly titled Histoire des Pieces des Monnoyes qui ont a ete Frappee dans l'Hindoustan (The Story of coins Struck in Hindustan), he found something rather different.

It was an illuminated manuscript prepared in Faizabad, the old capital of Awadh, in 1773 and the author was JEAN-BAPTISTE JOSEPH GENTIL, one of several French adventurers who were in India at that time to seek his fortune.

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