History of the taka

• 1. Introduction

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  The taka, sometimes called the tanka or tangka, entered circulation in the 14th century and traveled the Silk Road across Asia. Coins bearing this name were struck in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, Bengali, Nepali, Tibetan and Mandarin. That spread stretched from the Indian subcontinent to Tibet. Bengal became the stronghold of the currency, closely tied to the medieval Islamic history and culture of the region, and its name survives today in the modern Bangladeshi taka. Where did a single coin's name come from that could travel through so many empires and so many scripts? And how did one region's coin come to outlast the very dynasties that minted it?

• 2. Etymology

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  The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and Banglapedia trace the word taka to the Sanskrit ṭaṅka, meaning silver coin. Linguists call it a Kulturwort, a culture word whose ultimate origin remains unclear. They link it to the Turkic təñkə, meaning coin or money, with cousins in Bashkir təñkə, Tatar tanka, Uzbek tanga, Kazakh tenge and Russian denʹga. The Russian denga itself was borrowed from Tatar, with cognates in Chagatay: täŋkä, teŋkä and teŋge.

  Other scholars have proposed Middle Persian dāng or New Persian dānag, both meaning coin. Still others connect the word to the Turkic tamga, meaning mark or stamp.

  That unresolved question follows the currency across Asia, starting in the region where it became a symbol of sovereignty: Bengal.

• 3. Bengal's Sovereign Coin

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  In 1338, the traveler Ibn Battuta noted that the silver taka, not the Islamic dinar, was the most popular currency in Bengal. By 1415, members of Admiral Zheng He's entourage recorded the same dominance during their visit. Traditionally the taka was valued at one silver rupee in Islamic Bengal. It stood as the most important symbol of sovereignty for the Sultan of Bengal. The Sultanate of Bengal established at least 27 mints across its provincial capitals to strike the coin.

  Mughal Bengal later inherited that legacy, continuing to issue the taka under its own administration. As Bengal grew more prosperous and drew further into world trade under Mughal rule, the taka pushed shell currency out of rural markets. It became the region's standardized legal tender. Traders from four European companies used it in commerce. Merchants of the Dutch, French, Danish and British East India Companies all handled the coin.

  The Kingdom of Mrauk U, now part of Myanmar, circulated the Bengal tanka widely during the 16th and 17th centuries. At the time, the kingdom remained a vassal state of the Bengal Sultanate. That vassal arrangement was one path the coin took out of Bengal. Another ran north, into the mints of the Delhi Sultanate.

• 4. The Sultanate's Silver Tanka

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  Sultan Shams al-Din Iltutmish designed the currency of the Delhi Sultanate by combining elements from Muslim settlers with native Indian traditions. Its basic unit, the silver tanka, weighed one tola of 96 rattis, about 11.2 grams. That tanka broke down into 48 billon jitals, each carrying 2 rattis of silver mixed with copper, for a combined weight near 3.5 grams. Coins struck in Delhi carried the name of Caliph al-Muntasir on one face alongside Iltutmish's titles, most often al-sultan al-a'zam, meaning the very mighty sultan. The reverse of these coins bore the shahada: "There is no god but God. Muhammad is the Messenger of God." Some instead carried the phrase fi 'ahd al-imam, meaning in the time of the Imam.

  Muhammad bin Tughluq later reshaped the tanka into a form of representative money. The Mongols had already tested that concept as paper currency in China and Persia. Tughluq's version was struck in copper and brass, its worth backed by gold and silver held in the imperial treasury. It responded to a shortage of metal in circulation. Chaos followed the coin's 14th-century launch, and that turmoil contributed to the Tughluq dynasty's collapse. Silver eventually returned to the tanka's minting.

  Regional states rose from the Tughluq collapse: the Bengal Sultanate, the Bahmani Sultanate and the Gujarat Sultanate. Each struck the tanka in its own ruler's name. Long after, even the Mughal Empire's regional currencies still carried the name tanka, tangka or taka. That naming habit would carry the coin west, into the mints of Gujarat.

• 5. Gujarat, The Deccan And Odisha

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  In the 15th century, the Gujarat Sultanate began minting its own silver tanka on India's west coast. The coin served as a symbol of sovereignty for the region's Muzaffarid dynasty.

  Farther south, the tanka circulated widely across the Deccan, struck by both the Deccan sultanates and Mughal provincial administrations. In the Berar Sultanate and its successor, Berar Subah, one Tanka-i-Barari was set equal to eight Delhi tankas, a fixed local exchange rate.

  Odisha's epigraphic records from the 14th century use two distinct terms for the coin: vendi-tanka, for alloyed silver, and sasukani-tanka, for bullion. The currency had reached the region from the Delhi Sultanate during the first half of the 13th century. It stayed in use long afterward, a persistence confirmed by inscriptions left by the Ganga and Survamshi dynasties. The next stop for the tanka was the Kathmandu Valley, where King Indra Simha would introduce his own version in the 16th century.

• 6. The Himalayan Tanka

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  King Indra Simha introduced the tanka standard to the prosperous Kathmandu Valley, in Nepal proper, in the 16th century. He modeled it directly on the currencies already circulating in Delhi, Bengal and the Mughal Empire. The Nepalese tanka was a debased silver coin struck at a weight of 10 grams. It was issued alongside minor denominations of one quarter, one thirty-second, one 123rd and one 512th of that unit.

  The same trade routes that carried the tanka into the Kathmandu Valley would soon carry a related coin north into Tibet.

• 7. The Tibetan Tangka

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  Lhasa Newar merchants from Nepal introduced the tangka to Tibet in the 16th century, carrying Nepalese tanka along the Silk Road as they traded. For roughly three centuries afterward, the tangka served as Tibet's official currency. The Tibetan government itself did not begin minting the coin until the 18th century, striking its first tangka in 1763 or 1764.

  China's Qing dynasty, which held suzerainty over Tibet, opened its own mints in the region in 1792. The resulting Sino-Tibetan tangka carried inscriptions in Chinese alongside Tibetan text. Between 1912 and 1941, the Tibetan government issued paper banknotes in five denominations: 5, 10, 15, 25 and 50 tangka. Those notes were among the last forms the old regional currency took before national currencies replaced it across Asia.

• 8. Two Modern Currencies

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  Until 1971, the Pakistani rupee itself carried bilingual inscriptions in Urdu and Bengali, and people called it both the rupee and the taka. The Bengali language movement played a decisive role in winning that recognition for the taka in East Pakistan, the territory that would become Bangladesh.

  The Bangladesh Bank introduced the modern taka in 1972, once the Bangladesh Liberation War had ended, replacing the Pakistani rupee at par value. Bangladesh's Security Printing Corporation has produced the currency ever since, marking every note with two symbols, ৳ and Tk.