1 Rupee - Shah Alam II [Jayaji Rao]

Shah Alam II was the Mughal emperor in whose name virtually every major Indian princely state continued striking coins well into the nineteenth century — long after he had ceased to exercise any real authority, and in Gwalior's case, years after his death in 1806. This piece, dated 1810, is therefore a posthumous fiction: a coin bearing imperial sanction from a man four years in the grave, issued by a Maratha court that had its own political reasons for maintaining the Mughal titular framework rather than asserting outright independence.

Jayaji Rao Scindia was an infant when this coin was struck, with the state under regency control.