Folio 02 · about 4 minutes

Jama and Naam

The bahi writes a credit transaction in two places, once in the cash book and once in the account of the person concerned. Whether that makes it double-entry bookkeeping depends on what you think double entry is, and historians disagree.

What do jama and naam mean?

A bahi has two sides. जमा (jamā) is credit: what has come in, or what stands to someone's credit. नाम (nām) is debit, written against a name.¹ Some families wrote the second side as udhaar, what is owed.² The left–right arrangement is the same; only the vocabulary differs.

Which books did a firm keep?

The basic pair is a cash book and a ledger. Every transaction is entered first in the rokad-bahi, the cash book, and then posted to the khata-bahi, the ledger of personal accounts.¹ Names differ by region and language. In Gujarati firms the daybook is often called the rojmel and the ledger the khatavahi. [unverified — needs source]

Abbreviations in Mahajani ledgers show the same categories. Pandey's proposal reproduces a page where ra· stands for rokaḍ (cash) and na· for nakal (copy), both kinds of account.³ L. C. Jain's 1929 survey of indigenous banking gives a whole section to these methods of accounting.⁴ Those pages have not yet been read for this site, so the details below stay general.

Same transaction, two books

Take one ordinary credit sale and a later payment, and write both in each system. The bahi side follows the conventions in the sources above. It is an illustrative reconstruction, not a copy of a real ledger.

Both systems record the cash receipt twice, in the cash book and in the customer's account. The difference is in the sale. Double entry forces a second side for every transaction, so even a sale gets a Sales account. The bahi tracks people and cash with care, but may leave the nominal side in the daybook.

Was the bahi-khata a double-entry system?

The case for. In 1986 B. M. Lall Nigam published an article in the accounting journal Abacus whose title states his thesis: the bahi-khata as a pre-Pacioli Indian double-entry system.⁵⁶ The argument has a long tail. A Shivaji University study text for commerce students, published in 2025, argues that the bahi-khata predates the Italian method by centuries. It quotes a remark it attributes to Alexander Hamilton, F.R.S., that India's merchants had been, “from time immemorial, in possession of the method of book-keeping by double entry”.⁷ Neither the date nor the context of that remark is given in the text, so treat it as a quotation of uncertain origin.

The case against, or for “not quite”. The same teaching text concedes two differences from modern double entry. Nominal accounts are not posted to the ledger, so no profit and loss account can be drawn from it. And the double entry is not completed for every transaction, so no trial balance can be prepared.¹ It also notes that standard textbooks usually call the bahi a single-entry system.¹ The scholarly replies to Nigam came quickly. Christopher Nobes published a comment on his article in Abacus in 1987,⁸ and M. E. Scorgie followed in 1990 with a paper titled “Indian imitation or invention of cash-book and algebraic double-entry”.⁹ Their arguments are not summarised here because neither article could be opened for this site. [unverified — needs source]

The European side is debated too. Luca Pacioli's Summa of 1494 is the usual starting point, but Pacioli described a method already in use, and Benedetto Cotrugli wrote about it in 1458.¹⁰ Recent accounting history keeps pushing the European origin earlier. Alan Sangster, for example, has written on what may be the earliest known treatise on double entry, by Marino de Raphaeli.⁶

What remains unknown. For this site I found no surviving pre-1500 Indian merchant ledger that has been studied and published, and no documented route by which an Indian method reached Venice. The claim, common online, that Indian bahi-khata was the “direct precursor” of European bookkeeping is a popular claim, not an established finding. The cautious reading of the evidence is narrower. Indian merchants kept careful, two-sided personal accounts, posted from a cash book, on a system that suited a business run on credit between known names.

Those names and numbers were usually written in a script that outsiders could not read. That is the subject of the next chapter.