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exchange value relative to the price of all articles of 

 trade. Slaves and cattle in particular were always 

 valued in chank-shells. Ihus while a male slave was 

 worth one cow and three chank-shells, a female slave — 

 much more valuable, the suffragettes will learn with 

 pleasure, than a mere man— was worth as much as 

 three cows and four or five chank-shells. Now a cow 

 was valued at ten chank-shells, a pig at two shells, a goat 

 was the same rate, and a fowl at one packet of salt. As 

 a chank-shell was considered worth one rupee, a short 

 calculation will show that a male slave was worth Rs. 13, 

 and a female slave Rs. 34, or 34 shells. The ransoms of 

 villages captured during raids in these good old days 

 were largely paid in chank-shells, beads, cows, pigs and 

 other portable wealth. Chank-shells and beads were the 

 chief items of currency but even in Butler's time, the 

 inevitable invasion of the rupee was already successful in 

 the valleys most accessible to low-country traders. At 

 the village of Hosang-hajoo the chief remarked to Major 

 Butler, with a show of considerable pride, "since we 

 became British subjects, we have paid revenue in coin 

 and with it we can procure anything we require ; we 

 therefore no longer want shells and beads." 



I see no reason to believe that chank currency ever 

 extended beyond the hill peoples of Assam and possibly 

 some of the adjoining hill tracts. On some coins issued 

 by the ancient Pandiyan and Chalukyan dynasties of 

 southern India a chank-shell appears as the principal 

 symbol (Thurston, I, 328) ; this might be held as evi- 

 dence of a preceding currency consisting of the actual 

 object so represented, whereof the memory was perpe- 

 tuated in pictorial form upon one face of the coins and 

 tokens which came to take its place as more convenient 

 units of exchano-e. But there is much more reason to 

 believe that the chank was represented on such coins for 

 a similar reason to that which actuates the present-day 

 States of Travancore and Cochin to adopt a similar 

 symbol on their current coins. In these two States, the 

 homes ot southern Hindu orthodoxy, the chank-shell 

 symbolizes the religious belief of the ruling race and is 

 their emblem as the rose stands for England and the 

 thistle for Scotland. Both these States utilized it as a 

 distinctive symbol on their earliest issues of local postage 

 stamps in place of and to the exclusion of the sovereign's 

 head — the customary pivot of design in European stamps. 



