As the nation celebrated Gandhi Jayanti on October 2, inspiring stories of M.K. Gandhi were shared across print and digital media. Social media was populated with famous quotes by the Father of the Nation. Sculptures and statues were commissioned in the name of public art projects. The government undertook a week-long cleaning drive in celebration of a decade of the ‘Swachhata Diwas’, India’s largest cleaning drive till date.
Gandhi was deeply interested in inculcating good public sanitation habits among Indians along with his fight for Satyagraha and Ahimsa as well as the weaving and wearing of Khadi.
Despite his great contributions to India’s freedom struggle, Bapu as he is endearingly referred to, was not the first choice for the Indian Rupee.
Today, we perhaps cannot imagine the rupee without the face of Gandhi. But it was only in 1969 on the 100th birthday anniversary of Gandhi did his face appear on the Indian rupee. Today, the Indian rupee also celebrates the cultural heritage of the country with images of historic monuments. These range from the UNESCO World Heritage site, Rani Ki Vav to Delhi’s Red Fort and Odisha’s Sun Temple.
In a world where paper money is slowly losing relevance, there is an art market thriving with the support and interest of coin and paper money collectors. Auction houses are quite literally monetising on money while museums are being erected to house rare, well-preserved, notes. The pioneering auction house in India, to fuel the interest of numismatists has been Todywalla Auctions. Since 1964, the Mumbai-based auction house continues to hold the top spot for collectors, sellers and ardent researchers where coins and paper money can be documented and valued, privately sold or auctioned. The sheer frequency of their auctions is a testament to a growing network of collectors.
There are also collectors such as Rezwan Razack who have made the philanthropic choice of creating a private museum to house rare, exquisite notes. A trip to the Museum of Indian Paper Money in Bengaluru is an eye opening journey where the visitor is educated on the history and evolution of Indian paper money. The museum also sheds light into the art of collecting, documenting, archiving and making collections seamlessly accessible to a large audience.
A lesser-known gem in the heart of old Bombay, within the RBI premises, is the RBI Monetary Museum. Celebrating a 1,000-year-old history of the world economy, it highlights the transition from a world of barter system to one of coins and notes.
However, it is not just rare gold coins and old paper money notes that collectors are eyeing. In an interesting series of events, collectors drove up the value of King Charles’ bank notes to over eleven times their face value. The charity auction featured notes with serial numbers close to 00001. The low serial numbered notes are what will become collectors' items, which is perhaps why collectors had queued at Post Offices and outside Bank of England when these freshly printed notes were released in June.
We live in an exponentially growing digital era, where cashless is a preferred mode of payment and money can be transferred with the ease of scanning a mobile phone. Given the seldom usage of coins today, is it just a matter of time before paper notes are a rare, obsolete anomaly, only seen in the likes of an auction or museum?