2 1/2 Cash

The Madras Presidency's fractional cash denominations occupied an awkward administrative position — the cash itself was a tiny unit of account inherited from indigenous South Indian monetary practice, and the 2½ cash was an attempt to bridge that system with British decimal ambitions that never quite resolved cleanly. The East India Company's Madras establishment was still negotiating its own internal coinage standards in 1807, years before the consolidation efforts that followed the 1835 unification of Indian coinage under the Crown.