The facade of the old mint on Strand Road. A Telegraph picture

Last Wednesday was the day when exactly 250 years ago, the East India Company minted in Calcutta and circulated the first rupee or sicca as legal tender in the Mughal province of Bengal.

In his lecture organised by the Society for Preservation, Calcutta, P.T. Nair, known as the city’s “barefoot historian”, said the Nawab of Bengal gave formal sanction to the British to establish a mint here in 1757 only after they had been here for 150 years. After capturing Fort William on June 20, 1756, Siraj-ud-Doulah renamed Calcutta as Alinagar.

After Clive defeated him and the Nawab was forced to sign the treaty and grant permission to set up a mint at Alinagar to coin sicccas and mohurs of Murshidabad standard. The Calcutta mint (1757-1791) was located in a building next to the Black Hole in the old fort — that should be where the General Post Office is situated.

Before the arrival of an assay master and machinery from Europe, workmen from Murshidabad stood in. July 4, 1757, is regarded as the birth date of the first Calcutta rupee, by when 4,000 rupee were coined. Nair said the first coin minted at Alinagar-Calcutta is in the British Museum collection, and the first gold mohur struck at Alinagar is with a foreign collector. Forty thousand siccas were struck here between June 13 and July 28, 1757. Not till August 29, 1757, did the siccas minted in Calcutta become legal tender.

After the Battle of Plassey, and Siraj’s murder, Mir Jafar became the ruler. He revalidated Siraj’s sanad and on July 15, 1757, confirmed the production of new coins. Jagat Seth, the Nawab’s banker and one of Murshidabad’s leading shroffs, assured the fineness of the bullion and the correctness of the weight of coins before circulation. All formalities concerning the declaration of the sicca minted in Calcutta were observed and the rupee became a local tender.

In 1791, the mint was shifted to Church Lane in the building occupied by the Indian Government’s Stationer Office. The third mint still stands at Strand Road and is almost derelict. The Alipore mint was declared open on March 19, 1952.