The Bank of Bengal was one of the three Presidency Banks — the others being Bombay and Madras — and unlike a central bank, it issued notes redeemable only at its own offices, not across British India. The year 1857 places this note directly within the Sepoy Mutiny, which severely disrupted commercial activity across northern India and triggered acute credit stress in Calcutta's mercantile community. Whether notes of this date saw normal circulation or were caught up in the banking disruptions of that period is a question the surviving record doesn't cleanly answer.
P#S93 is scarce. The Bank of Bengal was absorbed into the Imperial Bank of India in 1921, and institutional paper from the mid-nineteenth century was not systematically preserved.
The Bank of Bengal was one of the three Presidency Banks — the others being Bombay and Madras — and unlike a central bank, it issued notes redeemable only at its own offices, not across British India. The year 1857 places this note directly within the Sepoy Mutiny, which severely disrupted commercial activity across northern India and triggered acute credit stress in Calcutta's mercantile community. Whether notes of this date saw normal circulation or were caught up in the banking disruptions of that period is a question the surviving record doesn't cleanly answer.
P#S93 is scarce. The Bank of Bengal was absorbed into the Imperial Bank of India in 1921, and institutional paper from the mid-nineteenth century was not systematically preserved.