Indian Antiquary Vol 56

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, Krishnaswami Aiyangar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 212

186
THE INDIAN ANTIQCARY
[OCTOBER, 1927
also advertised in a widely read newspaper stating that any information as to the whereabouts of the copper-plates would be welcomed. The appeal, however, though published several times, has not evoked any response.
"2. As regards the two plates which you allege to have passed into the possession of the English when the Cochin Fort was surrendered to them, I have ascertained that there are no records bearing on the subject in the Madras Record Office."
(A copy of this letter was communicated to me. Towards the end of 1926, I received in addition from Mr. C. W. E. Cotton a typed copy of an article in Portuguese on the Thomas Cana copper-plates published in the Epoca by the Rev. P. J. Monteiro de Aguilar. I am now recovering that article from a priest in India whom I supposed erroneously to be the author, and trying to get into touch with the author in Portugal. The article would be worth translating for the Indian Antiquary.
[On January 19, 1926, Mr. T. K. Joseph wrote to me: "All day on Dec. 23, a friend of mine in Lisbon, Mr. K. M. Panikkar, M.A., Bar.-at-Law, had the Torre do Tombo ransacked, but Dr. Antonio Baião, the Director-General, could find no copper-plates. My friend is making a search through the Ambassador H. E. Veiga Simoes."
(We should not give up hope yet. If a new search is made, we might begin with the State Archives of Goa, which are now being put in order.-H.H.)
SOME SOUTH INDIAN GOLD COINS. By R SRINIVASA RAGHAVA AYYANGAR, MA.
I. Some Old Maratha Coins.
FANAMS OF RAMA RAJA. A FIND of two hundred coins was reported in 1908 from the village of Kiltayanür, Tirukkovilur Taluk of the South Arcot District, Madras Presidency. They were then acquired for the Museum by the Government of Madras; sixty five of them were distributed among different Provincial Museums and 134 sold to the general public and numismatists. These coins were then wrongly identified as Kaļi fänums.
Kali fanams, or as they are sometimes called Kaliyugarajan fanams, were current in Kerala or North Malabar in the early centuries of the Christian era. Elliot in his history of South Indian coins says that there were two kinds of these, one issued by Kolatnad or Chirakkal Raja and the other by the Zamorin of Calicut, who, to distinguish this issue from earlier oncs, called thein pudiya (new) fanams. Both these coins though accepted and used as a mediun of exchange in Kerala or North Malabar, were not recognized as legal tender even in the contiguous province of Travancore. So in the early centuries when the means of communication was so small and the country was divided into several principalities cach under separate and independent administrations, it is not probable that these coins came to the eastern district and were current there. We may fairly conclude that Kaļi fanams were never accepted or used in places other than Kerala.
Vincent A. Smith in his Catalogue of Coins in the Indian Museuin, Calcutta, vol. I, bas included this as the coinage of Travancore State, and has brought them under gold Janams of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On page 316 he has described them as follows:
Obverse-a kind of dagger and other marks. Reverse-characters not read. . This coin is figured as itein 10 in plate XXX (page 324).
later, in 1918, there was yet another find of eighty similar coins from Kaţtâmbatti, a hanılet of the village of Kannalam in the Gingee taluk of the same district. In design, shape, size, weight and the character of the metal used (inferior gold 13 carats fine these are exactly like those of the 1908 find. They are almost all of them round varying from 2 to 22 of an inch in diameter and cup-shaped. They are almost of a uniform