Well, I couldn’t resist, and bought myself an Edward VII quarter anna from ebay

Much as you would expect, except that instead of wearing a crown, Edward VII is shown bare headed, making the resemblance to the British half penny even more marked

The only obvious difference being the longer Latin motto on the British coin, as opposed to the quarter anna which says in English Edward VII King and Emperor.

Why they reused the same head as that used in the British coinage is a bit of a mystery. All the rest of the imperial coinage in India shows the monarch with a crowned head.

And it’s not as if they didn’t use a crowned head on other imperial coinage. For example, the Ceylon 5c coin uses a crowned head

(The Ceylon Rupee separated from the Indian Rupee in 1870 and became a decimal currency. The original Queen Victoria 5 cent coin was a large copper coin similar to an English penny. During Edward VII’s reign it was replaced with a small square cupro nickel coin.

In Edward VII’s time the 5c coin was worth roughly ¾d, or about one and a half times the value of an Indian quarter anna.

After independence the new government continued to issue 5c coins to the same design, with the monarch’s head replaced by the Sri Lankan coat of arms, until some time in the 1990s when inflation had rendered the 5c coin worthless, by which time it was being struck in aluminium.

The British half penny and Ceylon 5c coin images have been sourced from public domain websites)