Chawal to Maund: The Full Traditional Desi Weight System Explained

Long before the kilogram, South Asia weighed everything — gold, wheat, spices, medicine, people's rations — on a chain of units that still shows up daily in Pakistani speech, even in a fully metric country. If you've ever heard "do tola sona," "ek pao aata," or "das man gandum," you've heard this system. Here's the whole chain, from a single poppy seed up to a wholesale maund, with exact conversions.

The full chain: خشخاش → چاول → رتی → ماشہ → ٹانک → تولہ → کرش → چھٹانک → پلا → پاؤ → سیر → پاسری → من

| # | اردو نام | Roman Urdu | Relationship | Approx. weight | |---|---|---|---|---| | 1 | خشخاش | Khashkhash | 8 Khashkhash = 1 Chawal | ~0.0019 g | | 2 | چاول | Chawal | 8 Chawal = 1 Ratti | ~0.0152 g | | 3 | رتی | Ratti | 8 Ratti = 1 Masha | 0.1215 g | | 4 | ماشہ | Masha | 12 Masha = 1 Tola | 0.972 g | | 5 | ٹانک | Tank / Tanka | 3 Tank ≈ 1 Tola | 3.888 g | | 6 | تولہ | Tola | 5 Tola = 1 Chatank | 11.6638 g | | 7 | کرش | Karsha | Ayurvedic dosing standard | 12 g | | 8 | چھٹانک | Chatank / Chhatank | 4 Chatank = 1 Pao | 58.32 g | | 9 | پلا | Pala | 4 Karsha | 48 g | | 10 | پاؤ | Pao / Paav | 4 Pao = 1 Seer | 233.28 g (historical) | | 11 | سیر | Seer / Ser | 40 Seer = 1 Maund | 933.10 g (historical) | | 12 | پاسری | Passeri | 5 Seer | 4.6655 kg (historical) | | 13 | من | Maund / Mann | the big trade unit | 37.3242 kg (historical) |

The core chain multiplies cleanly: 1 Tola = 96 Ratti, 1 Chatank = 60 Masha, 1 Seer = 80 Tola, 1 Maund = 3,200 Tola, 8 Passeri = 1 Maund. Pakistan's own government gazettes (the Sindh Government Gazette's published conversion table, among others) cite these same figures: 1 Tola = 11.6638g, 1 Seer = 0.9331kg, 1 Maund = 37.324kg, with 16 Chatank to the Seer.

Try any of these conversions instantly on the Unit Converter — every unit in the table above is built in, alongside ordinary metric and imperial units.

Where the numbers actually come from

Khashkhash, Chawal, Ratti, and Masha are jewellers' units, used for weighing gold, silver, gemstones, and — going back further — potent herbal/mineral medicine doses. A Ratti is tied to the historical weight of the *Abrus precatorius* seed (گنجہ), one of the oldest weight references in South Asia; Khashkhash is literally named after a single white poppy seed. Neither Khashkhash nor Chawal has an independently fixed gram value in any source we could verify — rather than guess one, both are derived from the well-documented ratio chain (8 Khashkhash = 1 Chawal, 8 Chawal = 1 Ratti) so they stay mathematically consistent with the rest of the system instead of introducing a number nobody can actually confirm.

Tank is a medieval jewel and mint-coin weight, heavily used across the Mughal Empire and western trading states — reported independently as "4 Masha," "roughly 3 Tank to a Tola," and "3.88g exact" across different sources, all of which agree with each other almost perfectly (3 × 3.888g = 11.664g, essentially identical to the Tola's 11.6638g). That level of independent agreement is why it's included with high confidence.

Tola, Chatank, Pao, Seer, Passeri, and Maund are the everyday trade units — the ones you'd hear at a sabzi mandi or a sonar's shop. Passeri in particular checks out cleanly against the rest of this chain: 5 Seer at the historical Seer value gives 4.6655kg, and 8 Passeri comes to 37.324kg — matching the historical Maund (37.3242kg) almost exactly.

Karsha and Pala come from a different tradition entirely — classical Ayurvedic and Unani pharmacy dosing, not the jewelry/grain-trade chain. Ayurvedic formularies cite clean, rounded dosing standards (Karsha = 12g exactly, Pala = 4 Karsha = 48g exactly) for practical medicine-measuring — very close to, but not quite identical to, what the trade chain's Masha would give for the same unit (12 Masha = 11.664g). Both are real, correctly-sourced figures from two different historical uses; we've used the Ayurvedic formulary standard for these two specifically, and disclosed the small gap rather than pretending the two systems always give an identical number.

The one place modern usage genuinely differs: Seer and Maund

Here's the part most conversion charts get wrong by only telling you one number. The historical/British-Indian standard — 1 Maund = 37.3242 kg, 1 Seer = 933.1 g — is what official documents and older reference tables cite. But today's Pakistani commodity and wholesale trade (wheat, sugar, rice — the "per maund" prices you see in market-rate news) very commonly rounds this to a cleaner "metric maund" of 40 kg and a "metric seer" of roughly 1 kg, to make the math work neatly against a kilogram scale.

Neither figure is "wrong" — they're two different, both genuinely-used conventions, the same way a "Pao" traditionally means 233.3g (an exact quarter-Seer) but almost everyone today means 250g (a quarter-kg) when they say it. Our Unit Converter offers both the traditional and modern Seer/Maund as separate, clearly labeled options — pick whichever matches your context: a mandi price quote is almost always the modern 40kg maund; an older document or gold-trade figure is almost always the traditional 37.3242kg one.

Dharana and Khandi/Candy: not unsourced, just genuinely more than one unit

An earlier version of this post left Dharana and Khandi/Candy out entirely, reasoning that the conflicting figures we'd found meant they weren't reliably sourceable. Further digging turned up something more interesting: both units are real, and both genuinely mean different things depending on which historical text or region you're reading — the conflict wasn't a sourcing failure, it was two (or three) correct-but-different answers.

Dharana (धरण) turns out to name at least two unrelated units. The Manusmriti describes a silver Dharana of 32 Ratti (2 Ratti = 1 Māṣaka, 16 Māṣaka = 1 Dharana), which comes to about 3.888g — closely matching the archaeologically measured weight of actual surviving Mauryan-era silver karshapana coins (3.4-3.6g; the small gap is normal minting/wear tolerance for hand-struck ancient coins). But the same text separately describes a gold Dharana of 3200 Ratti — about 389g, 100 times heavier. The Arthashastra (Kautilya) gives yet a third-named path (88 mustard seeds = 1 silver Māṣa, 16 silver Māṣa = 1 Dharana) that lands on the same value as the Manusmriti silver standard once anchored to a shared Ratti reference. Three genuine textual attestations, two real numeric outcomes — not one number to look up.

Khandi (also anglicized as Candy) has an even cleaner resolution. The relationship "20 Maund = 1 Khandi" really is consistent everywhere — what varies is the Maund itself, which British-administered India never standardized to one weight. Historical gazetteers are explicit about this: Madras Presidency fixed its Maund at 25 lb (making a 500 lb / 226.8kg Khandi); Bombay fixed its Maund at 28 lb (a 560 lb / 254kg Khandi); the Bengal bazaar Maund ran close to 100 troy lb — nearly 4x Madras's — giving a Khandi of roughly 746.5kg. (That Bengal figure is exactly where our earlier ~746kg estimate came from — it wasn't wrong, it was just one specific regional answer being presented as if it were the only one.) Other regional candies existed too (Cochin, Goa, and others are recorded at yet other values) — genuine, deliberate regional variation, the same category of problem as Marla not having one fixed size.

Rather than pick one of these and misrepresent the others, both units now have their own dedicated tool: the Dharana & Khandi/Candy Calculator lets you choose the specific textual or regional system you mean, shows the source relationship for each, and puts all the options side by side so the disagreement itself is visible rather than hidden behind one silently-chosen number.

Bahar remains excluded outright — it's reported as fluctuating 190-272kg "heavily by port city," which the sources themselves describe as commodity-dependent by design (the way "a barrel" means a different volume depending on whether it's oil or beer), not a fixed unit under any system we could find.

Try it yourself

Convert between any of these units on the Unit Converter — Khashkhash, Chawal, Ratti, Masha, Tank, Tola, Karsha, Chatank, Pala, Pao, Seer (both conventions), Passeri (both conventions), and Maund (both conventions) are all built in, alongside ordinary metric and imperial units. Jump straight to a specific pair like Tola to Grams, Maund to KG, or Chatank to Grams — or, for Dharana and Khandi/Candy specifically, use the Dharana & Khandi/Candy Calculator to pick the system you actually mean.

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