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Indian Paper Currency

Histories, type catalogues and auction records of India’s banknotes — written for collectors.

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Numismatics for India9 August 2026

Bank of Bombay: The Bank That Cotton Killed

For twenty-two years it put paper money into Bombay’s hands. Then the Government took the press away, and the bank went looking for something to replace it — and found the American Civil War, a broker who was handed a book of blank promissory notes, and one deleted clause. An illustrated, referenced history of the Bank of Bombay (1840–1868): its three note designs, dated to the day from the printer’s own London day-books; the rival that tried to destroy its currency with a rubber stamp; the Rs 1.89 crore collapse that a Royal Commission dissected over 787 pages; and the fourteen notes that survive. Every contested claim is flagged in the text.

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Numismatics for India7 August 2026

Bank of Bengal: The Bank That Printed India

For fifty-five years one Calcutta bank held the sole right to put paper money into Indian hands. It survived a forger who hid a lakh of rupees inside a wall, a currency that changed its name overnight, and a mutiny that broke out a year after it had already redrawn its notes — then lost the printing press on the very day it finally built the branches that might have saved it. An illustrated, referenced history of the Bank of Bengal’s ten note designs (1806–1862), the London and Edinburgh engravers who cut them, and the 112 notes that survive.

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Numismatics for India7 July 2026

The Bank of Western India

A private Bombay exchange bank, founded in 1842, printed some of the earliest paper currency of western India — one engraved design built around the Bombay Town Hall — and then outgrew its own name to become the Oriental Bank. Almost no issued notes survive; the series is known chiefly from front proofs. An illustrated, referenced catalogue of the denominations (5 to 5000 Rupees), the issued note and the proofs, with prices.

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