Formerly Sunars were employed for counting and testing money in the
public treasuries, and in this capacity they were designated as Potdar
and Saraf or Shroff. Before the introduction of the standard English
coinage the money-changer's business was important and profitable,
as the rupee varied over different parts of the country exactly
as grain measures do now. Thus the Pondicherry rupee was worth 26
annas, while the Gujarat rupee would not fetch 12 1/2 annas in the
bazar. In Bengal, [656] at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
people who wished to make purchases had first to exchange their
rupees for cowries. The Potdar carried his cowries to market in
the morning on a bullock, and gave 5760 cowries for a new _kaldar_
or English rupee, while he took 5920 cowries in exchange for a rupee
when his customers wanted silver back in the evening to take away with
them. The profit on the _kaldar_ rupee was thus one thirty-sixth on
the two transactions, while all old rupees, and every kind of rupee
but the _kaldar_, paid various rates of exchange or _batta_, according
to the will of the money-changers, who made a higher profit on all
other kinds of money than the _kaldar_. They therefore resisted the
general introduction of these rupees as long as possible, and when
this failed they hit on a device of marking the rupees with a stamp,
under pretext of ascertaining whether they were true or false; after
which the rupee was not exchangeable without paying an additional
_batta_, and became as valuable to the money-changers as if it were
foreign coin. As justification for their action they pretended to
the people that the marks would enable those who had received the
rupees to have them changed should any other dealer refuse them, and
the necessities of the poor compelled them to agree to any _batta_
or exchange rather than suffer delay. This was apparently the origin
of the 'Shroff-marked rupees,' familiar to readers of the _Treasury
Manual_; and the line in a Bhat song, 'The English have made current
the _kaldar_ (milled) rupee,' is thus seen to be no empty praise.