1 Anna WW II Cash Coupon

Palitana was a minor princely state in Kathiawar (present-day Gujarat) whose ruler held limited fiscal authority under British paramountcy. These wartime cash coupons — pressboard rather than true banknote paper — were emergency local scrip, issued when metal coinage became genuinely scarce across the subcontinent during the Second World War. The colonial administration had been draining copper and nickel out of circulation for war production, and dozens of small Indian states responded with improvised low-denomination substitutes like this one.

The pressboard substrate makes surviving examples particularly vulnerable to delamination and edge splitting — not a grading observation, but a structural fact about the material itself.