A cartoon being circulated on X says Indians should thank the British because James Prinsep deciphered the Brahmi script & helped recover our history. :)) Do you know before he became a so-called expert on our ancient scripts, Prinsep’s primary day job was serving as the Assay Master (chief metallurgist & currency controller) at the Banaras & Calcutta Mints. He was not an academic; he was an economic agent sent to fundamentally alter India's wealth distribution system. Until the 1830s, India had a beautifully diverse, highly resilient decentralized currency system. Local kingdoms, merchant guilds & regional mints issued their own silver and gold coins. Local money-changers (Shroffs) evaluated coins based on pure metal weight. James Prinsep was the literal architect who destroyed this system. Using his position as Assay Master, Prinsep spent yrs systematically studying the purity of native Indian coins. He did not do this out of cultural curiosity, he did it to calculate how the East India Company could completely monopolize India's money supply. His efforts directly culminated in the Coinage Act of 1835: The Elimination of Indian Heritage: Prinsep spearheaded the policy that completely banned all local Indian regional coins & traditional designs. He personally oversaw the design of the new, uniform colonial Silver Rupee. He forced the removal of traditional Indian symbols, replacing them with the cold, imperial face of British King William IV. What makes this a financial "thug" operation is how the transition was enforced on ordinary Indians. By passing laws that declared traditional regional currencies invalid for tax payments, the British forced Indian merchants, farmers & citizens to bring their centuries-old ancestral coins to Prinsep's mints. Under Prinsep's direct technical supervision, the British mints engaged in massive institutional exploitation: - They took the pure, high-quality silver coins of Indian states. - They melted them down in giant cauldrons. - They charged the native Indians a heavy seigniorage (a minting fee/tax) just to exchange their own ancestral silver for the new British currency. This artificial bottleneck triggered a massive shortage of circulating cash in rural India, causing local economies to crash while systematically vacuuming pure silver out of Indian hands & placing it directly under East India Company control. It was 1 of the largest state-sanctioned currency manipulation schemes in world history. But what is often sold to us is the idea that Prinsep was a polymath who single-handedly deciphered our ancient scripts. Ask the same people who Rathnapala was & you are likely to be met with complete silence. :(