It’s older than the Mughal Empire’s best-known buildings
The word rupee traces back to the Sanskrit rupya which means wrought silver. In the 1540s, Sher Shah Suri introduced a standardised silver coin called the rupiya, and the Mughals, and later the British, kept both the name and the basic format.
Its symbol was designed by a student
The ₹ sign only arrived in 2010, and it came from D. Udaya Kumar, then a postgraduate student at IIT Bombay, who won a national contest to design it. It blends the Devanagari letter "र" with the Latin “R”, and the two horizontal bars are meant as a nod to the national flag. Not bad for a design project.
Your banknote speaks 17 languages
Look closely and you’ll find Hindi and English on the front. Flip it over and there’s a small language panel spelling out the denomination in 15 more Indian languages. It’s a quiet, pocket-sized tribute to the country’s linguistic diversity.
The Rs 1 note plays by different rules
Every other note carries the RBI Governor’s signature, but the ₹1 note is issued by the Government of India through the Finance Ministry and signed by the Finance Secretary. It’s the odd one out in your wallet, if you can still find one.
There was once a ‘Gulf rupee’
Until 1966, the RBI issued a special version of the rupee for use in Gulf states including Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and the Trucial States. When India devalued the rupee that year, those countries moved to currencies of their own, and the Gulf rupee quietly disappeared.