1/4 Rupee - Ahmed Shah Bahadur Katak mint

Ahmed Shah Bahadur, the Mughal emperor nominally depicted on this coin, was by the 1750s a ruler in name only — blinded and imprisoned by his own wazir, Imad ul-Mulk, in 1757. The Marathas exploited precisely this imperial vacuum, issuing coins in his name across territories they militarily controlled as a mechanism of administrative legitimacy. Katak, the old Odishan capital on the Mahanadi, was one such mint operating under Maratha suzerainty following their consolidation of Orissa.

The thirty-year striking window for this type reflects continuous Maratha use of a frozen regal year, a common practice that renders individual date attribution within the series essentially impossible without die study.