Speaker
This talk traces the rupee’s five-hundred-year journey across India and beyond, from 1538 to its modern, digital forms. Drawing on a landmark exhibition and the accompanying publication, Odyssey of the Rupee: From India to the World, the session explores how a single denomination carries within it entire histories of economics, commerce, empire, and identity. What can a coin, passed from hand to hand across centuries, still tell us about where we come from?
Bringing perspectives of numismatists, economists, and historians from the book, the talk examines coinage as more than just currency, but rather as evidence; a material record of the political and economic forces that have shaped our reality. Marking the Republic of India’s rupee at seventy-five years, the session situates this anniversary within a far longer arc, inviting the audience to see the coin in their pocket as the latest chapter in a story centuries in the making.
In collaboration with:
Venue: Seminar Halls
Speaker
Shailendra Bhandare
Shailendra Bhandare is the curator of South Asian and Far-Eastern Coins and Paper Money at the Ashmolean Museum. A Fellow of St. Cross College and a member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford, he began his career as a numismatist with a visiting fellowship at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. He was then appointed a post-doctoral fellow of the Society for South Asian Studies, working as a curator at the British Museum on the coins of the later Mughals and Indian Princely States. He was appointed curator of coins at the Ashmolean Museum in 2002. He holds a first degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences, a Master’s in History, and a Doctorate in Ancient Indian Culture, all from the University of Mumbai.
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