- Lived:
- birth year unknown, probably around 1270 · Kannāṇā, a village near Delhi → the treasury and mint of the Delhi Sultanate
- Field:
- assaying, metallurgy, gemology and practical mathematics — dravya-parīkṣaka, examiner of coin and metal, in the imperial mint under Alāuddīn Khaljī and his successors
- The Big Idea:
- Working knowledge is worth writing down. A Jain mint officer put everything he knew — how to test a coin, grade a gem, price a granary, calculate an exchange rate — into plain Prakrit verse for his son, and accidentally became the most trustworthy witness we have to the economy of medieval India.
- In their words:
- He tells us himself why he wrote his gem manual: having seen with my own eyes the gems in the treasury of Alāuddīn (Ratnaparīkṣā, 1315; the rendering follows S. R. Sarma's scholarship)
- If you remember one thing:
- In a book full of saints wrapped in legend, Pherū is the man with no legend at all — no miracles, no hagiography, no portrait, no grave — and he is completely recoverable anyway, because he wrote down what he knew how to do. Competence, honestly documented, turns out to be its own immortality.