Hard cash

Why is cash hard? Yes, I know the old trick of biting into a gold coin — if it was pure gold, the coin broke, if it was fake, your teeth did. That doesn’t quite explain it, does it? An easy dodge is the traditional view that hard cash is coinage as opposed to the illusory promise of a paper banknote. Still, hard cash remains the answer to every Mumbaikar’s cosmic question: How much is the pagar?

Long before 1677, when Gerald Aungier opened his Mint to coin ‘Rupees, pices and budgerooks,’ the Kolis survived on pagar. In those days, pagar was paid out in coinage variously Portuguese, Gujerati, or Moghul—but the paymaster, like the word, was always Portuguese. The payment was budgerook, or more properly Portuguese, bazarucco, of the Kannada original bazaar-rokh, market money.

So Pagar, like that other Bombay staple, the vada-pao, is Portuguese. But that’s for another Sunday. I’m going to ignore that culinary diversion and move on to matters fiscal and fungible, by returning to hard cash.

Cash was borrowed into English in the 16th century when the British were still successfully commandeering Iberian ships. To the Portuguese, caixa was just small change, as it was in the markets where they bought or extorted revenue as kash, panam, or the more respectable, pagoda. 

‘Kash’ is the Tamil word behind caixa. 80 kash made a fanam. It isn’t clear why the Tamil word ‘panam’ got thus distorted, but it is clearly spelt with ‘f’ on coins minted by the East India Company in the 1700s. Very likely, fanam is the version Arab traders took to the European market. Ibn-e-Batuta too records the coin as fanam in his Rihla in 1344.

Both panam and cash survive in modern Tamil as synonyms for money, but the pagoda has ended its oriental career as legal tender. The word has a vexed origin. It appeared in European accounts shortly after Vasco da Gama’s junkets in Calicut.

Portugal’s first gift to the Zamorin was sanitaryware: a china basin, ill-calculated to co-opt someone who used a spittoon of pure gold. On this first visit, Vasco the tourist visited a temple and reported pagodes dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
Let’s imagine the moment. Vasco’s soldiers gape at the temple, and lacking words, they resort to gestures.

They point to the Chera gopuram of the Bhagavati temple on the horizon. What’s that? Their local guide answers, ‘Bhagavati!’ And Bhagavati travels as pagode into Europe, the pyramidal tower of the temple now the symbol of pagan India. Another explanation touts a Persian origin: but-khana or ‘house of idols.’ Unlikely. Busy burning ships full of Hajjis, would Vasco discuss the local scenery with them?

Pagoda became hard cash to the Portuguese trader in the fabulous market of Vijayanagara. This kingdom’s coins were stamped with images of the favoured deity, Varahaswami, and 30 years after Vasco, pagode was a catch-all European term for anything pagan.

Vijayanagara coins were still in use when the British began to mint their own currency in Fort St. George at Madraspattnam. The first gold coins the East India Company produced were ‘Three Swami Pagodas’ stamped with the image of Lord Venkateswara and his consorts.

Pagoda, with its Far East connotation, confused me as a child. ‘Do I have a Pagoda Tree in my backyard?’ my father protested whenever prices went up. It wasn’t all parental rhetoric: there is a Pagoda Tree, Styphnolobium japonicum. The last emperor of the Ming dynasty hanged himself from one in his courtyard in April 1644—but my father didn’t know that. His metaphor was a carryover from British India when our subcontinent was the Pagoda Tree raining gold for the Empire. It was all about hard cash.

Kalpana Swaminathan and
Ishrat Syed write as Kalpish Ratna