1 Rupee - Shah Alam II Bareli mint

Shah Alam II was the Mughal emperor in name only by the late eighteenth century — blind, dependent on Maratha protection, and presiding over a court that controlled almost nothing beyond Delhi's walls. Coins struck in his name at provincial mints like Bareli reflected this fiction deliberately. Awadh's nawabs found political utility in maintaining the Mughal fiction on their coinage even as the emperor himself had been rendered militarily irrelevant after the disaster at Panipat in 1761.

The Bareli mint operated under Rohilkhand's complex jurisdictional history, a region that had changed hands violently between Rohilla Afghans, Awadh, and the British within a single generation.