Farewell to small coins: An elegy for the chaar anna

This is an elegy for another anna. Not the celebrated capital-A, Anna, but the lowly, lower case kind. Less hero than character actor, the kind who is always around yet rarely missed when he quietly slips off stage. And when news comes of his demise, we say: Oh, I thought the guy died ages ago. I speak of the chaar anna, chavanni, 25 paisa coin. In an age where corruption is measured in thousands of crores who remembers the little guy anymore? Born in 1950 – when 16 annas made a rupee – the 61-year old chavanni, as we know it, met an early demise this year, withdrawn from circulation by virtue of Section 15A of the Coinage Act of 1906. A very big Act to lower the boom on such a small coin. [caption id=“attachment_65233” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Photo:Flickr”]  [/caption] The cost of minting it had long exceeded its face value. Even switching from nickel to ferratic stainless steel couldn’t save it. Now the 25 paisa joins the ranks of the coin has-beens alongside the little square one naya paisa, the hexagonal three paisa, the  frilly edged ten paisa. Loose change of another era, scrap metal for our generation. The 25 paisa was always the leader of that little league.  At my Jesuit school, we had to hand over at least 25 paisa for the “poor box.” It was meant to offer a weekly lesson in remembering those who were less fortunate, to embed in us a sense of giving and sharing. The chaar anna was the  tipping-point coin - not so valuable that middle class boys like us would really feel the pinch in our pocket money. But not so insignificant that we wouldn’t feel its loss either. That sacrificed 25 paisa could have bought us a goli churan, or pickled imli in little plastic packets, jhal muri, Chiclets, shaved ice gola. A friend remembers that when he moved to Kolkata in the eighties the lowest bus fare was 25 paisa. Another remembers growing up in Bombay in the seventies: “The vendors with pushcarts, mostly bhaiyyas from UP would shout Kaanda chaar aana kilo,”  Onions for 25 paisa a kilo! The coin rises in value as we reverse through time. In our childhood 25 paisa was a luxury reserved for chocolate bars, says my mother. For two paisa you could get a bhaand of  mishti doi  or sweet yoghurt. “You will think twice about buying a four anna chocolate but happily buy books worth four rupees,” my grandmother would chide my grandfather when he showed up home with another bag of books. My great grandmother gave the old maid 25 paisa a week as her allowance which she faithfully saved in her Lakshmi’s pot, the native version of the British piggy bank. (Its bigger brother, the athanni was too valuable to be piggy-banked. It had to be used at once.) That was then. The 25 paisa peaked in 1982 when it was made  a commemorative coin for the IX Asian Games in New Delhi.  But it’s been all downhill ever since. The value of the money in our pockets changed with each passing decade, making the small coin ever smaller. In an India where housewives haggled fiercely over the price of a bunch of coriander, 25 paisa had meant something. When the vegetable seller was out of change, she’d give my mother a handful of green chillies instead of a 25 paisa coin. By 2011, change came in rupees not paisas.  When the RBI put it out of its misery back in May, the 25-paisa had already lost all respect  “_Athanni, chawaani bhikhari bhi nahin rakhte (_not even beggars keep 25  and 50 paisa coins),” scoffed Shyamlal, a rickshawpuller in Raipur. The victim both of our economic success and our inflation, we hardly noticed when we stopped using the chavanni anymore. The rupee now has its own symbol. That’s a currency status symbol of sorts,  a shot of pride in the arm of India Shining. One rupee, two rupee – easily confused with each other these days. Perhaps it’s deliberate because, really, what’s the difference anyway? Just one rupee, yaar. The 25 paisa, only 19 mm in diameter, a humbler coin from a humbler past. The little guy now left way behind, dumped in our rising shining times. We have no use for it anymore.  Once the banks collect all the old coins, the central bank will melt them out of existence. Just a big lump of scrap metal to be recycled. I still have my 25-paisa coins, tucked away in my childhood piggy bank, still uncracked and waiting for the right rainy day. These are the last of the chavannis, now no longer legal tender, but still precious to me. It’s the coin that taught me the value of money, both to hoard and to give.  That, in my book, is  a chavanni worth saving.