8 Sicca Rupees Commercial Bank, Calcutta

The Commercial Bank of Calcutta was established in 1819 as one of the early joint-stock banking experiments in British India, operating outside the monopoly privileges held by the Bank of Bengal. Notes of this type were payable in Sicca Rupees — the Bengal standard coin, calculated at a slightly heavier weight than the Madras or Bombay rupee — a distinction that mattered enormously in mercantile settlements where exchange calculations between regional standards were a daily friction.

The bank collapsed in the early 1830s during the wave of failures that swept Calcutta's agency houses, and surviving notes are exceptionally rare. Most were either redeemed before closure or lost in the subsequent scramble among creditors.