1 Pagoda - 3 Swami Type

The Madras Presidency pagoda coinage was not a British invention — it was inherited wholesale from the Vijayanagara tradition and maintained deliberately to avoid disrupting the currency conventions of south Indian merchants who refused to accept unfamiliar coin types. The East India Company struck these pieces because trade demanded it, not because London had any particular interest in issuing gold with Hindu iconography.

KM#289 spans nearly five decades of production, making precise attribution to a single year essentially impossible without die study. The Company's Madras mint records from this period are fragmentary at best.