NEW BOOK: HISTORY OF HUNDIS USED IN INDIA

This book provides a detailed history and usage of Hundis, which were a form of scrip used in India for quite a long time.

One early seventeenth-century French traveler to India, Mr. J. B. Tavernier, writes:

While collecting and researching Hundis, it becomes very clear that Indian bankers were using a variety of innovative financial and credit instruments to facilitate trade and the movement of large sums of money across the subcontinent in a most secure and efficient manner, hundreds of years before the Western banking system.

Because of their flexibility, their extensive use, and the variety of Indian languages that were used to draft these Hundis, they have been little understood and always very confusing to the outside world.

I have already published 2 books related to Hundis—the first book, "Catalog of Hundis Used in India," lists with photos of all the different types of Hundis that were used and details about the printing and usages of different types of Hundis that were used in British India and the Republic of India. The second book, "Catalog of Hundis Used in Princely States of India," lists all the different types of Hundis that were used in the Princely States of India with photos. Both the books document some of the Hundis for the first time.

In this book, I have provided an overview of what the Hundis were and have compiled the history and usage of Hundis in India in one place for the general readers. This was quite a challenge, as more than a century has gone by without producing much written information about Hundis.

Hundis are perhaps the oldest surviving credit instrument in human history.

Kautilya makes a mention of an Adesha Patra in his Arthashastra, an ancient Indian treatise written in Sanskrit around the second century BCE about statecraft, economic policy, and military strategy. An Adesha Patra is an order on a banker asking them to pay the money of the note to a third person—which conforms to the definition of the Hundi.

Hundis were a financial instrument invented by Indian bankers and extensively used by all participants in the largest economy of the world at that time—large business houses, traders, local lenders, farmers, and even small shopkeepers in the local bazaars across the Indian subcontinent.

Hundis were used

• as remittance instruments (to transfer funds from one place to another),
• as credit instruments (to borrow money: IOUs),
• for trade transactions (as bills of exchange).

Hundis were issued by banks and financial institutions, but more importantly, by thousands and thousands of sahukars and shroffs and sarrafs who acted as local Indigenous Bankers, providing facilities for money transfer between cities, bill discounting, and lending, using their well-established and trusted networks- before the Western banking companies were established in British India and Burma.

To read the complete book, see:
History of Hundis Used in India (https://foxly.link/HundisUsedInIndia)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
NEW BOOK: CATALOG OF HUNDIS USED IN INDIA (https://www.coinbooks.org/v26/esylum_v26n15a07.html)
NEW BOOK: HUNDIS IN PRINCELY STATES OF INDIA (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n11a08.html)

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