Old Hinged Silver Container, hand-worked. Early 1900s. The Pahar Ganj, New Delhi silversmithy shop, source for this Old Hinged Silver piece, believed it to be Gujerati in origin; it could easily have come from any one of the states in the north-west of India, another of the finely-wrought Silver knick-knacks of the princely families of that region, of that early 20th.century period.
High Silver content, almost certainly crafted from melted down British Raj Silver Rupee coins.

From the first British East India Company mints in India of Rupee coinage in the mid 1800s, the 91.6% Silver content of the previous Mughal Silver coinage was followed, scrupulously, so that everywhere on the sub-continent the exact value of the Silver coinage was a known; even the exact weight of the British-controlled Silver Rupee was a tolah, as was the previous Mughal Silver Rupee. For the Tribals of India this coinage was one of the three staples of prestige, the other two being property and livestock.
The British government devalued and debased the Silver coinage of India in 1936, but so much of the coinage had been collected and stored away as wealth that even today, ninety years on from the devaluation, pre-1936 Silver Rupee coinage may be easily purchased at whatever the current world Silver price might be.
Naturally, some of this currency attracts a higher-than-face-value price; coinage depicting the Empress Victoria in mint or good condition, for example, attracts a premium above a George V.