1/2 Rupee - Shah Alam II [Shivaji Rao]

Indore's half rupee coinage of this period operates under a deliberate fiction: the coins bear the name of Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, who had died in 1806, decades before these pieces were struck. This was not error but convention — many Indian princely states continued issuing coins in the name of long-dead Mughal sovereigns well into the nineteenth century as a way of asserting continuity with established monetary authority, even as British paramountcy made that authority entirely theoretical. Shivaji Rao Holkar, who ruled Indore from 1886 to 1903, had no practical need to innovate.