Rhodes inspects a collection. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

?It is easier to trace old Indian coins sitting in London,? says Nicholas Rhodes, secretary-general of Oriental Numismatic Society. The scholar, on yet another trip to Calcutta, specialises in coins of Northeast India, many of them collected from families in Europe that lived here during the Raj.

The soft-spoken man reflects on the hurdles that collectors here face. ?The antiquity laws have made things difficult in India.? He has a bigger grouse against some local museums. ?In the state museum in Guwahati, I got to see every coin I wanted to. But Calcutta?s Indian Museum is beyond bounds. I wonder if they know exactly what they have. You put in a request for one coin and a wrong coin comes. If they say that the other coin is not there, there is not much you can do,? he shrugs.

Rhodes has been coming to Calcutta since 1964, when he was a student, and even owns a a place on Middleton Street.

?That?s my second home,? laughs the man who had met his wife, a Darjeeling girl, here. By then, the love affair with Indian coins had begun. ?I was five when I got my first. It belonged to the state of Mysore, with a nice caparisoned elephant, just the kind to appeal to a child.?

Rhodes is happier calling himself a researcher than a collector. ?I buy coins only for research,? he says, adding it ensures access. ?Some coins disappear into private collections and you don?t see them for generations. That happens with museums too.?

His biggest motivation is laying hands on unrecorded coins. ?Historical documentation is not very strong in India. And any history of the Northeast has a political slant.? Coins give evidence of political history and trade routes.

The ancient Greek coins, he says, are works of art, with beautiful portraits, while lots of Islamic coins have nice calligraphy. In monetary terms, the costliest is a thousand tola coin of Jehangir?s era. ?That?s 11 kg of pure gold. No, I have not seen it. It?s stashed away in some Swiss bank vault. All we have is a photograph in Numismatic Digest,? he laughs.

Rhodes points at the surprising abundance of silver coins in Indian history, though silver mines are rare here. ?All the silver came from Afghan-istan and Burma. Perhaps that made forgery difficult.?

His work mandates learning various scripts ? Bengali, Arabic, Urdu, Devanagari, a little Chinese? ?One of my first papers reattributed a wrongly read and dated Assam coin. It was in Chinese,? he smiles.

Prices of old coins are skyrocketting in the international market, with dealers becoming more aware. In such a context, Rhodes is happy to see Indian collectors like J.P. Goenka trying to bring local coins back to the country. ?And there are more collectors now. That is a healthy sign.?