Indian Antiquary Vol 60

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

Page 189

8PTIMBA, 1931)
NOTES ON INDIAN MAUNDS
161
NOTES ON INDIAN MAUNDS. By W. H. MORELAND, C.8.1., C.I.E.
1. Introductory. TEB maund is perhaps the most treacherous unit which the student of Indian history has to interpret, for it may stand for almost anything from 2 to 82 lb., or occasionally even more. I have had oocasion to evaluate a number of maunds which occur in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and for a moment I thought of making a complete study of the subject; but I quickly found that the early history would have to be pursued through a number of languages of which I know nothing, and that the subject calls for collective rather than individual work. As a beginning, I offer in these papers the facts which I have been able to colleot from Persian, Portuguese, Datch and English sources; and I have made bold to offer also a few guesses, in the hope that they may provoke students to gather additional facts from dated inscriptions, and from the literature of various other languages notably Sanskrit, Bengali and Tamil-which will carry the subject further.
Maund' represents the Indian word man. The Portuguese first met this word on the West Coast, and, according to their regular practice, nasalised it and added their characteristic termination -o, giving mão, the form which appears continuously in their literature from the year 1513 onwards. English merchants, taking the word from Portuguese interpreters, and denasalising it, seem to have fused it with 'maund,' an English word which then meant a kind of basket, sometimes used as a measure; and, the original sense having become obsolete, the derived one now holds the field.
The origin of the Indian word must be left to philologers. The suggestion has been made that it is the Arabic mann, brought to India by merchants trading on the coast ; but it has also been contended that a similar or identical Indian word, derived from the Sanskrit root má (measure), may have been already in existence when the Arab merchants arrived. The point might conceivably be cleared up by a study of early Indian literature : all I can Bay is that, if the Arabs brought the word, they did not bring the unit, for, as we shall see later on, their mann was about 2 lb., while the man found by the Portuguese on the West Coast was about twelve times as large.
Indian weights are nowadays commonly presented in a single scale, running from the ratk to the maund and its multiples. The literature, however, suggests that the two ends of this scale grew up independently, and were subsequently linked through the tola. The amall units, constituting what may be called the jewellers' scale, were based on seeds, and originally were not absolutely fixed; as Thomas showed, the tola (96 ratti) ranged from 168 to 186 gr. in North India in the sixteenth century, and its definition as just 180 gr. belongs to the British period. The upper part of the scale may be called commercial, and the larger units probably originated in some fact or facts connected with transport. In it 40 sera make one maund, and 20 maunds make a bahar, candy, or mani. To link up the two, all that is needed is to fix the number of tolas in one ser, a number which varies within wide limits. according to the size of the maund.
In the English literature there are occasional references to maunds containing more, or less, than 40 sers. All the cases which I have been able to study fall into two groups : either the divergence represents a trade-allowance, or it is due to the use of two denominations. Trade allowances up to 5 sers in the maund recur in the Dutch and English commercial records of the seventeenth century, and are doubtless older; a sale of cloves, for instance, at so much the 'maund of 42 sers,' meant that the seller made an allowance of 2 sers in the maund, or 5 per cent, not that the maund contained 42 sers in general. Again, one occasionally meets such a statement as 'here the maund contains 16 sers,' where the context shows that what is
1 Hobson-Jobson, 8.0. ; Dalgado, 8.v. Mio (I): Oxford English Dictionary, 3.u. » Hobson-Jobson, 3.vv. Rutteo, Tola; and E. Thomae'o paper quoted thore.