The Sarhind Mint

Sirhind — in its Mughal and later Sikh spelling Sarhind, from the Persian Sar-i-Hind, the Head of India — occupied a position of unique strategic importance on the Punjab plains, equidistant between the Sutlej to the south and the Ghaggar to the north, astride the great trunk road between Delhi and Lahore. Every army moving between the Mughal capital and the northwest passed through or near it. Every new power establishing itself in the Punjab felt the need to hold it.

The city was the seat of the Nawab-Governor of the Sirhind Suba — one of the principal administrative divisions of Mughal Punjab. It had been a royal mint town at least since Akbar's early years. The mint building, as with all Mughal provincial mints, was part of the administrative compound. It struck coins for the imperial treasury and the local revenue economy simultaneously. When power changed, the mint changed its dies; the building was occupied by whoever held the city, and the output of silver rupees resumed bearing the new sovereign's name and regnal year.

The Sarhind mint is thus an unusually complete record of Punjab's political history across four centuries. No fewer than twelve distinct dynasties or political authorities are documented as having issued coins here — from the great Mughal emperors down to the Patiala state's last Rajashahi rupees. That the mint name survived every convulsion — carved onto new dies in the name of Nadir Shah, of the Khalsa, of the Afghan Durranis, and finally of the Phulkian Sikh chiefs — is itself a statement about the permanence of Sarhind's administrative role even as its political masters changed with remarkable frequency.

It is under Aurangzeb Alamgir (AH 1068–1118 / AD 1658–1707) that the Sarhind mint's extended silver rupee series begins. The earliest documented rupees from Sarhind in this collection date to AH 1098 / Regnal Year 30 — the thirtieth year of Aurangzeb's reign, approximately AD 1686–87 — and the series continues without apparent break through the remaining years of his fifty-year reign, to AH 1118 / RY 50.

Aurangzeb had early in his reign removed the Islamic declaration of faith — the Kalima — from coin dies, on the grounds that coin-handling was desecrating a sacred text. In its place, an imperial Persian couplet carried the sovereign's name and titles. The Sarhind rupees follow this standard type: the obverse couplet names the Emperor as Alamgir, World-Seizer; the reverse carries the mint name Sarhind with the Hijri date and regnal year. The long unbroken series running from RY 30 through RY 50 suggests the mint operated continuously, restruck with fresh dies as each year turned.

Aurangzeb died on 3rd March 1707, having reigned nearly fifty years. His death set in motion a succession crisis of remarkable destructive force. Six emperors occupied the Mughal throne in the twelve years that followed. The Sarhind mint recorded every one of them.

On 22nd May 1710, Baba Banda Singh Bahadur defeated Nawab Wazir Khan — the man responsible for the execution of Guru Gobind Singh's two younger sons — at the Battle of Chappar Chiri, six kilometres from Sirhind. The city fell the same day. Wazir Khan was killed on the battlefield. For the first time in history a Sikh sovereign authority occupied the Punjab's great administrative city.

Sirhind had a working mint issuing Mughal silver rupees when Banda's forces entered it. The sikhcoins.in page on Banda Singh Bahadur states directly: "Sarhind had a working mint, issuing Mughal silver rupees, and that the same mint was used to strike the very first Khalsa rupees is highly probable." The coins of Banda's sovereignty — bearing the Gobindshahi couplet and naming the mint as Maswarat Shahr (the Walled City) or simply as the Khalsa — survive in two known types, dated Year 2 and Year 3 of his brief reign.

Banda's six-year rebellion — fought across the Punjab from the Yamuna to the Beas — cracked the foundations of Mughal provincial authority in a way from which it never fully recovered. He was captured in December 1715 at Gurdas Nangal and executed at Delhi in June 1716. But the coins he struck, and the memory of the city he briefly held, would resonate across Sikh history for generations. Within fifty years the city would fall to the Khalsa permanently — never to revert to Mughal or Afghan authority again.

In AH 1151–52 / AD 1738–39, Nadir Shah Afshar, the warrior-king of Persia, crossed the Indus and marched on Delhi. He annihilated the Mughal army at the Battle of Karnal on 13 February 1739. Emperor Muhammad Shah was taken captive in his own camp and compelled to attend a durbar at which Nadir Shah sat upon the Mughal throne and received obeisance as suzerain of Hindustan. For fifty-seven days Nadir Shah held the capital — during which an estimated 20,000–30,000 residents were massacred — before withdrawing with the Peacock Throne, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and the entire Mughal treasury.

During this period of Persian suzerainty, the Sarhind mint struck rupees in the name of Nadir Shah. These are among the most historically remarkable coins in the collection: the only documented occasion on which a non-Mughal foreign conqueror's name appeared on the dies of this Punjab provincial mint while the Mughal emperor was still nominally alive. The collection holds a specimen dated AH 1152 / RY 01 — the first regnal year of Nadir Shah's acknowledged suzerainty over Hindustan.

Aziz ud-Din Alamgir II (AH 1167–1173 / AD 1754–1759) was placed on the throne by Imad ul-Mulk after the deposition of Ahmad Shah Bahadur. His reign coincided with one of the most turbulent periods in Punjab history — the simultaneous struggle between Maratha power, Durrani power, and the rising Sikh Misls. The Sarhind mint struck silver rupees throughout, with specimens in the collection from AH 1167 / RY 1 through multiple years of his reign.

In 1758, the Marathas — acting through their shrewd agent Adina Beg Khan, the Afghan-appointed governor of Jalandhar who had changed sides — swept through the Punjab in a lightning campaign under Raghunath Rao (Raghoba). Maratha forces took Lahore, pushed west and briefly occupied Peshawar, and extended their influence as far south as Multan, driving the Durrani garrison entirely out of the Punjab. Ahmad Shah Durrani was engaged in Afghanistan; the Punjab appeared to have passed to Maratha control.

It was a brief triumph. Adina Beg died in September 1758, and without his administrative genius the Maratha position in the Punjab became untenable. The collection includes a rupee struck in the name of Shah Alam II and dated AH 1174 / Ahd (accession year) — a coin of the Maratha-backed regime struck somewhere in the theatre of the Third Panipat campaign. Attributing it to the Sarhind mint itself requires caution: by this date Ala Singh of Patiala was already in effective control of Sirhind, operating as the Durrani's own ally in the region. The Maratha forces — encamped at Panipat for three months before the battle of 14 January 1761 — had no practical means of reaching or operating the Sarhind mint. The coin is more likely a field-mint or camp-mint issue struck in the Panipat area during the Maratha encampment, in the name of the nominal Mughal emperor whose cause they had come to defend, bearing the local regional mint attribution. Alamgir II was murdered by Imad ul-Mulk in November 1759.

The table below summarises the documented issuers of the Sarhind mint in chronological sequence, as catalogued in the Sarhind Mint gallery. Gallery prefix numbers are shown in their post-correction numbering.