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104
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[APRIL, 1899.
are presented in the old booke, and in innumerable reports of local and general scales spread over many centuries, in a most bewildering maze of forms and details, but it may be taken from one who has studied them for years that they are essentially as above stated.
I have differentiated the concurrent scales by the titles of literary and popular, because the former is that which alone is to be found in the classical books, and the latter is the scale which the Muhammadan conquerors found to be everywhere in use on their irruptions in the eleventh and subsequent centuries of the Christian Era. That the two scales were actually concurrent for many centuries is shown by the antiquity of some of the works in which the literary scale is quoted, by the fact that the details of the popular scale are traceable to the old Greek scales, at any rate clearly in part, and by the quotations of both concurrently for purely mathematical purposes by the author of the Lilávati in the twelfth century.
I must ask my readers for special attention to what I have just stated, vix., the existence in India of two concurrent Troy scales - a literary one of 320 raktıkds to the pala, and a popular one of 96 ratís to the tôlá. I do so because it is on this cardinal fact that the coming arguments are based.
Now, as might be expected, it is the popular scale that the practical Muhammadan corquerors caught up, shifting and changing the details in substance and in name to buit their own preconceived ponderary notions, but adhering strictly to its main features and essential points, and spreading it everywhere, so far as their influence or authority extended. They never varied materially from the great fact of the scale, that 96 ratis made a tola.
So when the Europeans came the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, the French that was the scale, which, with an endless variety of intermediate detail it is true, they found spread far and wide along the Indian coasts and ports: that was the scale they reported, more or less incorrectly and ignorantly in their various languages, in all its bewildering nomenclature: that was the scale they eventually and in due course ill-treated with new names and small changes to an almost infinite extent. To attempt, as I have done ante, Vol. XXVII. p. 63 ff. and p. 85 ff., to dive into the jungle of Indo-European Troy weight is to plunge into a very thick tangle indeed. However, the resnlt of any such attempt will, to my mind, show .that, despite ill-treatment and misreporting, the scale has never altered materially, and is now, and substantially has always been, what it was originally - 96 ratís to the tólá.
It is, indeed, this combined Græco-Indo-Muhammadan scale, which has at last spread itself, under British guidance, all over modern India, becoming crystallized in one form of it, the North Indian, in the authorized general scale of the Imperial Government - in other forms of it in the authorized scales of the great Governments of Madras and Bombay.
So far, then, we have arrived at one distinct notion, vis., that it is the popular scale of 96 ratis to the tôlá which has settled itself down on India. What, then, has become of the old literary scale of 320 raktikas to the pala? Is it dead ? Not by any means, as will be presently seen. In the first place, though South India is now given over to the popular scale, so pronounced a strong bold of Hinduism is not likely to have lost all trace of the literary scale, and indeed it is there that the most interesting struggle between rough and ready Muhammadan innovation and dreamy Hindu conservatism is observable in the various existing native nomenclatures of the weight and coinage systems.
Bat there is a far stronger proof than this of the vitality of the literary scale. It does not require much imagination to sappose that the literary scale was not a literary invention, and that it, or something very like it, most once have had a concrete existence. The proof of the correctness of such a supposition lies in the fact that it is the literary, and not the popular scale, which is found to have spread itself everywhere in the Far East.
I fear that the mere indication of the proof of this fact will require as close attention from the reader as the arguments I have already imposed. The subject is, indeed, as full of difficulties
