Shah Alam II was the Mughal emperor in whose name dozens of nominally subordinate rulers continued striking coin long after the empire had effectively collapsed — Jaipur among them. The practice was political theater as much as monetary policy: using the emperor's regal years on local coinage maintained a fiction of Mughal suzerainty that suited both parties, giving the Jaipur durbar a legitimizing framework while extracting nothing from a Delhi court that had lost the ability to demand anything.
The twenty-year span of this type overlaps almost exactly with the period in which Jaipur shifted from loose Mughal client to de facto Maratha tributary, before British paramountcy reshaped those relationships again after 1803.
Shah Alam II was the Mughal emperor in whose name dozens of nominally subordinate rulers continued striking coin long after the empire had effectively collapsed — Jaipur among them. The practice was political theater as much as monetary policy: using the emperor's regal years on local coinage maintained a fiction of Mughal suzerainty that suited both parties, giving the Jaipur durbar a legitimizing framework while extracting nothing from a Delhi court that had lost the ability to demand anything.
The twenty-year span of this type overlaps almost exactly with the period in which Jaipur shifted from loose Mughal client to de facto Maratha tributary, before British paramountcy reshaped those relationships again after 1803.