1 Rupee - Shah Alam II Bagalkot mint

Shah Alam II ruled as Mughal emperor for nearly half a century, yet spent much of that reign as a political prisoner or pensioner of whatever power happened to dominate northern India at the time — the Marathas, the British, and briefly the Afghans under Ahmad Shah Durrani. The Maratha practice of striking rupees in his name was a deliberate legitimizing maneuver: Maratha chiefs lacked the dynastic authority to issue coinage under their own names, so a captive Mughal emperor's title served as the necessary legal fiction. Bagalkot, a mint town in the Deccan under Maratha control, produced these pieces throughout the confederacy's long decline.

The date range spans the disaster at Panipat in 1761 through the Second Anglo-Maratha War — decades of near-continuous conflict that make a tightly attributable mint date on any single specimen from this series genuinely difficult.