He was twelve years old when he opened his grandfather's iron safe and found something that made no sense. A currency note stamped with the words Pakistan Note: Payment Refused. The Reserve Bank of India seal was right there on the paper. So was the word Pakistan. That contradiction, lodged in a boy's mind in a pre-Google world, became the seed of one of the most remarkable private collections in India's history.
Fifty years later, Rezwan Razack—co-chairman of the Prestige Group, the Bengaluru real-estate giant behind Forum Mall and Prestige Tech Park—can trace every banknote India ever issued from 1812 to the present. His currency museum, housed within the Prestige premises, has received former RBI governors, school children, and historians. The collection represents something far more than a hobby: it is a physical archive of the Indian subcontinent's economic and political life.
"From a hobby it became a passion. Then an obsession. It's been more than 50 years and I'm still pushing."Rezwan Razack
The story of that childhood banknote, it turns out, encodes an entire chapter of Partition history most textbooks skip. When India and Pakistan became separate nations in 1947, Pakistan had no currency of its own. The two countries had been using the same British India notes.
The solution: overprint those existing notes with the words Government of Pakistan and Hukumat-e-Pakistan in the watermark window. The note Razack's grandfather had was one of these — except someone had cleverly scratched off the overprint, hoping to pass it as a regular Indian note. The bank was not fooled. It stamped the note and returned it.
"The history of partition," Razack says quietly, "is that the fight between India and Pakistan had become so vulnerable, so very tough, that the Reserve Bank of India was asked to manage Pakistan's affairs for one more year past August 1947." By June 1948, they were asked to leave.
There is a note in Razack's museum that survived a shipwreck. The SS Egypt sank in 1922 carrying over a million pounds of gold and banknotes from the Nizam of Hyderabad — unsigned, because signatures were always applied in India, not at the English printing press. The ship went down 400 feet below sea level. Twelve years later, salvage teams reached the wreck. When they pulled up the gold, they found the banknotes too. One of them, signed by the salvage team, now sits in the museum. Its paper is crisp. Its printing is sharp. It had spent over a decade in saltwater.
"Not only did it survive the ocean," Razack notes, "it survived the salt water for 12 years. The quality of paper and print from Waterloo and Sons, London — extraordinary."
NOTES FROM THE EDGE OF HISTORY
A currency note salvaged from the SS Egypt, which sank in 1922 carrying the Nizam of Hyderabad's notes — signed by the Italian rescue team after 12 years underwater.
Overprinted British India notes from 1947 — Pakistan's first currency, printed in Nasik on Indian Reserve Bank paper.
A 2½ rupee note ("Rupees Two and Eight Annas") — a denomination almost no living Indian has seen.
Prop money from the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy, partly shot in India with Kabir Bedi.
A note designed for Edward VIII featuring a portrait the Palace complained made the king look like he was wearing a bath towel.
That last item is, admittedly, the most delightful. A currency design was sent to Buckingham Palace for royal approval. The palace replied that His Majesty had approved the design — but that whatever he appeared to be wearing looked like a bathrobe, and could they please fix it. They did. Edward VIII abdicated shortly after, and the note never entered circulation.
"Gandhi almost didn't make it to the note. There were pressures to use Ambedkar and various other leaders. Instead of controversy, they removed all portraits — and the Ashokan pillar stayed till 1989."Rezwan Razack
This is the kind of detail Razack keeps. Gandhi's face, now as ubiquitous as the rupee itself, was not on Indian currency until 1989 — on a 500-rupee note. For decades after Independence, the notes carried only the Ashokan pillar. The king's portrait had been removed; a founding leader's had not yet replaced it. The gap was filled by a pillar.
Former RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das came for a scheduled thirty-minute visit to the museum. He stayed for three hours. He had signed a one-rupee note in his earlier role as Finance Secretary — the one-rupee note being the only denomination signed not by the RBI Governor but by the Finance Secretary, because a one-rupee note is legally treated as government money, not central bank money. Das wanted to know if the Reserve Bank itself had these artifacts. It doesn't. The RBI was born in 1935. Razack's collection begins in 1812.
There are also the 5,000 and 10,000-rupee notes, demonetized in 1978. One such note in his collection arrived wrapped in an envelope that had been sitting in a Bombay cupboard for decades. It had been gifted — in its envelope, unused — to the late Kannada film legend Rajkumar, by a Bengaluru family. After Rajkumar passed, the family had no use for it. His son eventually walked into Razack's office and left it on his desk. It was the one type missing from the collection.
Razack's family roots are in the Kutchi Memon community — traders who migrated from Sindh to Kutch 600 years ago, and eventually to Bengaluru. His father started with a fabric shop on Commercial Street in 1956. It is still there. The values he absorbed in that shop — precise measure, honest dealing, always give a little more than you promise — translated directly into how Prestige builds. "If we say it's 800 square feet," he says, "it will be 801. But it won't be 799."
The connection between building and collecting is not something he theorizes about. He simply notes: he is drawn to old things. His home is 150 years old, restored rather than renovated. He never collected coins. Only paper money. One passion, all resources. For over five decades.
His latest book, Paper Money of the Princely State of Hyderabad, released in January by former RBI Governor D. Subbarao, started as a half-page newspaper article from forty years ago that he felt had too many gaps. It became 388 pages.
"When kids come to the museum now, they don't know there was a 2,000-rupee note. They don't know there was a 1,000. They were born post-2016. Like that, slowly, money is going to fade away."Rezwan Razack
He predicted in 2012 that physical currency would vanish. Nobody believed him then. Now he doesn't carry cash. GPay works. Even beggars, he jokes, need a QR code. And as UPI absorbs more of daily life, the artifacts in his glass cases inch closer to something genuinely irreplaceable — not just collector's items, but the last physical evidence that a civilization once trusted ink on paper to move mountains of value around the world.
What does he want a child walking through the museum in 2075 to feel? He thinks for a moment. "He's going to be fascinated. It's something he's not held in his hand or felt. It's going to be like showing someone one of those old radios. This was money. This is how we used it. It's not just a number — because in time to come, it's all going to be numbers."
(Rezwan Razack spoke with Neha on the Expressions podcast, produced by The New Indian Express Group. The Prestige Currency Museum, Bengaluru, is open to the public.)