The rupee with a pig on it

George V came to India in 1911 to be shown to his subjects. At the Delhi Durbar that December, the only one a reigning monarch ever attended, he announced from the royal pavilion that the capital would move from Calcutta to Delhi. A new reign needed new coins, and the rupee, the coin everyone handled, needed a new face.

It got one. The face was fine. The trouble was further down.

A king in his robes

The new coins were commissioned from the sculptor Bertram Mackennal, an Australian who had already made the king’s portrait for British coins. For India the bust was shown crowned and robed, wearing the collar of the Order of the Indian Empire, the order of chivalry the British had created for India. The collar was a chain of small emblems: roses, peacocks and elephants.

On a coin that fits in a palm, an elephant in a chain of emblems is a very small elephant. The engraving gave it a body and legs out of proportion, no visible tusks, and a trunk so short it read as a snout. Seen in the hand, in a bazaar, in poor light, the elephant on the king’s chest looked like a pig.

Why that mattered

For Muslims the pig is unclean. A silver coin bearing what looked like one, placed on the king’s own person, passed from hand to hand in every market in the country, was not a small matter. Ananth Karthikeyan, writing in DNA, notes that some British officials saw an uncomfortable echo of 1857, when rumours about cartridges greased with animal fat had helped set off the uprising. Fifty-four years was not long enough to forget.

The government did not argue. The coins were withdrawn, and the large stock that had not yet been issued was melted.

How many got out

The numbers vary a little by source, but they agree on the shape. CoinVarieties lists 4,300,000 rupees struck at Calcutta and 5,143,000 at Bombay for 1911, about 9.4 million in all. Karthikeyan puts the number that actually reached circulation at about 700,000. CoinVarieties says roughly 95 per cent of the 1911 coins were melted down and struck again as rupees of 1912 and 1913.

The silver did not go anywhere. It came back with a better elephant.

The 1912 fix

From 1912 the obverse was redesigned. The elephant on the collar was given a proper trunk, tusks and legs, and nobody mistook it again. The king’s portrait stayed. The 1911 coin, struck for one year and mostly melted, became the one people look for.

Collectors still call it the pig rupee. It is a silver coin of 11.66 grams at .917 fine, listed in the standard world catalogue as KM-523. The name has outlived both the king and the Raj.

What it says about coins

Coins are the most handled pictures in any country. A painting hangs where a few people see it; a rupee goes into every pocket. That is why governments put kings on them, and why a single badly cut elephant, a few millimetres high, could become a political problem.

It also says something about how designs travel. The portrait was made in London, showing a king wearing an order the British had invented for India. The people who designed it did not think to look at it the way a shopkeeper in Lahore or Dacca would. The shopkeeper saw at once what they had missed.

If you think you have one

Look first at the date, and then at the collar. On a genuine 1911 rupee the small elephant on the chain has the short, snout-like trunk that gave the coin its name. On 1912 and later rupees the trunk is long and the tusks are visible. Copies and restrikes of the 1911 coin exist, so weight, edge and silver content matter as much as the picture. A numismatist with a scale and a loupe can tell you in a few minutes what a photograph cannot.

A coin found in a family box is rarely what the family hopes. This one, occasionally, is.