World coins chat: Bangladesh

5 posts
Bangladesh is a country in South Asia bordering India, Myanmar and the Gulf of Bengal. It is the most densely populated country in the world if you exclude city states. With 168 million, it is the 8th most populous country in the world with the land mass area ranking 94th.


Flag of Bangladesh


Emblem of Bangladesh which features on a lot of its coins.


The Bangla people settled the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent centuries ago and formed Buddhist kingdoms whenever it was not part of larger Indian empires. In the 13th century Islam arrived in the Bengal region, but many local traditions stayed intact and were assimilated. The Bengal Sultanate existed until the Mughal Empire annexed Bengal in the late 16th century.

The British conquered Bengal in the late 18th century, and in the 19th century the region was absorbed into the British Indian Empire. The Bengal region was notorious for its separatist sentiments against British rule.

After the Partition of India in 1947, Bengali was partitioned with the western part joining the Republic of India and the eastern part joining Pakistan as East Pakistan. This was a geographic and ethnic anomaly, as there was 1500 km of India in between them and the ethnicities were very different. Islam was the only unifying factor, but was practised differently in West Pakistan, who viewed East Pakistan as backward and impure.

Economic neglect and discrimination by West Pakistani authorities led to the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1970-71. The West Pakistani forces and militias were responsible for mass executions and rape of Bangladedhi girls and women, but exact figures are still disputed and this is still a sensitive topic in both Pakistan and Bangladesh.

India intervened in this war which resulted in Bangladesh becoming independent in 1971. It suffered from poverty, overpopulation and corruption for most of its existence but has developed more positively during the last 20 years. Bangladesh is regarded as a 'Next Eleven' economy, a group of countries that are next in becoming emerging markets.

Currency
The Bangladeshi Taka derives its name from Sanskrit Tangka and is related to Tenge, Tanga, Tenne, etc. used in Central Asia and India. The currency of the Bengal Sultanate was named Tanka. During the Pakistani union, Pakistan Rupee coins and notes bore the word Taka next to Rupee.

The Bangladeshi Taka was introduced in 1972, a year after independence and replaced the Pakistani Rupee at par. It was initially worth 8 Taka per USD, but lost value almost every year after. By 1987 it had dropped to 31/$ and in 2015 to 78/$.

Coins
Bangladeshi coins are a feast of aluminium and steel. They are relatively difficult to find for a country that populous.

In 1973 aluminium coins of 1, 5 and 10 Poisha and steel coins of 25 and 50 Poisha were introduced. Steel Taka coins followed. Nowadays only steel coins of 1, 2 and 5 Taka circulate.

Coins from Bengal Sultanate (listed under Indian States):
https://en.numista.com/catalogue/inde_princiers-2.html#devise2924

Coins from Bengal during the British colonial period (listed under British India):
https://en.numista.com/catalogue/inde_britannique-1.html#devise2142

Modern Bangladeshi coins:
https://en.numista.com/catalogue/bangladesh-1.html
Done with the topic :-)
Added link to Bengal coins listed under British India. These are from 1767-1835, after which Bengal became part of British India and adopted the Rupee.
Very nice concise writeup. Just to add that in 1905, Lord Curzon who was the Viceroy at the time partitioned bengal along Hindu-Muslim lines and forced mass migrations of the populations in a bid to quell the nationalist movement. However, it had to be reversed a couple years later due to law and order issues, but the damage had been done to the pluralistic fabric of the Bengal region.
This historically explains the anomalous formation of East Pakistan due to this artificial creation of the muslim dominated area within the Bengal presidency even before the official declaration of the Muslim league to create a homeland for muslim indians and decades before the partition of 1947
Outings administrator
Our hisory begins from the time before Asokan empire. Most of it was always almost Buddhist population.
Arakan was under Burmese rule for years and the mainland of Bengal had Sultanate and then Nawabs of Bengal and Murshidabad.British colonized it for almost 250 years then we were under partitioned again under Pakistanis. After the independece of 1971, we are almost likely the old Buddhist Kingdoms and the free Sultanate of Bengal. Today, we stepped into the glorious freedom of victory of 46 years of Bangladesh!

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