Gwalior's coinage during this period occupies a peculiar administrative limbo. Daulat Rao Scindia had signed the Treaty of Surji-Anjangaon with the British in 1803, ceding significant territory and accepting a Subsidiary Force, yet retained enough nominal independence to strike rupees in the name of the Mughal emperor — Akbar Shah II, who himself held little more than ceremonial authority in Delhi after Wellesley's campaigns gutted what remained of Maratha power.
KM#201 is a product of that fiction: a feudatory minting coins invoking an emperor who ruled nothing, issued from a state that answered increasingly to Calcutta.
Gwalior's coinage during this period occupies a peculiar administrative limbo. Daulat Rao Scindia had signed the Treaty of Surji-Anjangaon with the British in 1803, ceding significant territory and accepting a Subsidiary Force, yet retained enough nominal independence to strike rupees in the name of the Mughal emperor — Akbar Shah II, who himself held little more than ceremonial authority in Delhi after Wellesley's campaigns gutted what remained of Maratha power.
KM#201 is a product of that fiction: a feudatory minting coins invoking an emperor who ruled nothing, issued from a state that answered increasingly to Calcutta.