For whose eyes? Coinage, communication and multi-scripturalism in Early Historic/Early Medieval South India

Abstract

Multi-scripturalism on coins is known from many parts of the world, but in first-millennium CE peninsular South Asia aninshriptional or multi-scriptural designs were more common than coins bearing only a single script. This contrasts with other monetised parts of contemporary Afro-Eurasia. Broadly, in the first millennium, coins became a major vehicle for projecting single scripts across political spaces. In South Asia, the relationship between script and power worked differently. This paper uses examples coins from the peninsula, mainly datable to the seventh to eleventh centuries, alongside multi-scriptural inscriptional evidence to challenge assumptions in numismatic literature that multi-scripturalism was ‘simply’ a necessity of communicating with multi-lingual subjects. First, this was a challenge faced equally elsewhere. Second, epigraphic and literary evidence indicates that literate people were usually literate in plural languages and scripts. A more detailed analysis of when, where and how multiple scripts were used on coins, and to say what, opens up new ways to understand how scriptural recognition (including among non-literate viewers), multi-scriptural register shifting and the role of script in regional political identities overlapped with the often enacted, in-person ceremonial and ritual dimensions of state acts, such as coins and inscriptions. It also helps to pinpoint the power of multi-scripturalism during a transformative political and cultural period.