What was the medium of trade exchange during vedic period ?
i. Nishka
ii. Krusnal
iii. Shatman
iv. Gan
v. Shreni

Question

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Correct — option (1), 'i, ii and iii'. This question prints FIVE items, not four, and the whole of it turns on separating three units of value from two forms of association. Statement i, Nishka, is the best attested of the three: the Rigveda uses nishka for a gold ornament worn at the neck or breast — the Maruts are described as nishka-griva, wearing nishkas on the neck — and the same word does duty as a measure of value in gift and exchange, so a nishka can be both worn and given in payment. Statement ii, Krusnal, is the krishnala, the small red-and-black seed of the gunja creeper, later called the ratti, which served as the smallest standard weight for gold and silver; a medium of exchange by weight needs a unit, and this is the unit the Vedic texts use. Statement iii, Shatman, is the shatamana, literally 'a hundred manas', a piece of metal reckoned at a hundred krishnalas and named in the later Vedic literature, so it is a defined value built directly on statement ii. Those three form a single coherent system of valuation by weight of metal. Statement iv, Gan, is the gana, a troop, group or corporate body, and in later usage the republican assembly of a gana-sangha; statement v, Shreni, is the guild of artisans or traders that becomes prominent from about the sixth century BC and which even functioned as a banker holding permanent endowments. Both are institutions through which exchange was organised, and neither is a thing that changed hands as payment. Since only option (1) takes exactly i, ii and iii, it is the answer. It is worth adding that true coinage — the punch-marked pieces — belongs to the sixth century BC and after, so the Vedic 'medium of exchange' is metal by weight and cattle by count, not coin.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This option drops the nishka and admits the gana, which is the wrong trade in both directions. The nishka is the one item on the list that the Rigveda itself uses as a medium of exchange, so any answer that leaves it out has discarded the strongest statement in the set. The gana, meanwhile, is not a unit of value at all: in the Vedic hymns it means a troop or company, and in later political vocabulary it denotes the corporate body of a gana-sangha republic. A candidate picks this option by treating the five items as an undifferentiated list of unfamiliar Sanskrit words and choosing three of them, rather than asking of each one whether it names a thing that could be handed over in payment.  (c) This is the only option with four items in it, and its length is part of its appeal — a candidate who recognises nishka and krishnala as genuine may reason that a longer answer must be safer. But it admits both of the false statements at once, the gana and the shreni, and both fail the same test. The shreni is a guild, an association of artisans or traders; guilds handled money, took deposits and even administered permanent endowments recorded in inscriptions, but an institution that manages payments is not itself a means of payment. Adding two institutions to two genuine units of value produces an answer that is half right, and in a combination question half right scores nothing.  (d) This option keeps the nishka and the shatamana but replaces the krishnala with the shreni, and the substitution destroys the internal logic of the answer. The shatamana is defined as a weight of one hundred krishnalas, so a candidate who accepts statement iii has already accepted statement ii — the two stand or fall together, and no reading of the evidence admits the derived unit while rejecting the unit it is derived from. The shreni, meanwhile, belongs to the organisation of crafts and trade rather than to its currency. Noticing that two statements in a list are logically linked is often the quickest route through a combination question of this kind.

Concept: Before coinage, exchange in India was conducted in cattle and in metal reckoned by weight, and the Vedic vocabulary preserves both. Cattle were the great measure of wealth — the word for wealth itself, rupa and dhana apart, is bound up with cows, and a bride-price or a poet's fee could be counted in them. Metal was handled as ornament and as weighed pieces. Nishka is the key term: a gold ornament for the neck in the Rigveda, and simultaneously a value that can be given away, so the same object is jewellery and payment. Weighing required a standard, and the standard was a seed of remarkably consistent mass, the krishnala or gunja berry, later known as the ratti; the shatamana, a hundred of these, appears in the later Vedic texts as a defined piece. Other terms of the same family are hiranya-pinda, a globule of gold, and later suvarna and pada. What none of this amounts to is coinage: a coin is a piece of metal issued with a mark that guarantees its weight and fineness, and in India that begins with the punch-marked silver pieces of about the sixth century BC, in the age of the mahajanapadas and the second urbanisation. Gana and shreni belong to that later world of organised trade — the corporate body and the craft guild — and are institutions rather than money.

State PCS 2023 Q5 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q5 — History PYQ with Answer