Candy (unit)

British India is shown in pink on this 1837 map. The Madras Presidency is in the southeast, the Bombay Presidency is in the west and the Bengal Presidency is in the northeast.

The candy or candee (Marathi: खंडी, khaṇḍī;[1][2] Tamil: கண்டி, kaṇṭi;[3] Malayalam: കണ്ഡി, kaṇḍi,[4] കണ്ടി, kaṇṭi[5]), also known as the maunee, was a traditional South Asian unit of mass, equal to 20 maunds[6] and roughly equivalent to 500 pounds avoirdupois (227 kilograms).[4][7] It was most used in southern India, to the south of Akbar's empire, but has been recorded elsewhere in South Asia. In Marathi, the same word was also used for a unit of area of 120 bighas (25 hectares, very approximately), and it is also recorded as a unit of dry volume.

The candy was generally one of the largest (if not the largest) unit in a given system of measurement. The name is thought to be derived from the Sanskrit खण्डन (root खुड्) khaṇḍ, "to divide, break into pieces",[5] which has also been suggested as the root of the term (sugar-)candy. The word was adopted into several South Asian languages before the compilation of dictionaries, presumably through trade as several Dravidian languages have local synonyms: for example ఖండి kaṇḍi and పుట్టి puṭṭi in Telugu.[8]

  1. ^ Molesworth, J. T. (1857), A dictionary, Marathi and English (2nd ed.), Bombay: Bombay Education Society, p. 193[permanent dead link].
  2. ^ Vaze, Shridhar Ganesh (1911), The Aryabhusan school dictionary, Marathi-English, Poona: Arya-Bhushan Press, p. 118, archived from the original on 2012-12-15.
  3. ^ Winslow, Miron (1862), A comprehensive Tamil and English dictionary of high and low Tamil, Madras: P.R. Hunt, p. 231[permanent dead link].
  4. ^ a b "candy", A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, vol. 2, 1893, p. 66.
  5. ^ a b Yule, Henry (1903), Hobson-Jobson: A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive, London: J. Murray, p. 155, archived from the original on 2012-12-12.
  6. ^ Prinsep, James (1840), Useful tables, forming an appendix to the Journal of the Asiatic Society: part the first, Coins, weights, and measures of British India (2nd ed.), Calcutta: Bishop's College Press, pp. 81–82.
  7. ^ The Anglo-Hindoostanee Handbook, Calcutta: W. Thacker & Co., 1850, pp. 213–16.
  8. ^ Brown, Charles Philip (1903), A Telugu-English dictionary (2nd ed.), Madras: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, p. 770[permanent dead link].