1 Rupee - Shah Alam II Surat Mint

Surat was among the earliest footholds of the East India Company on the subcontinent, but by the early nineteenth century the mint there was already an anachronism — operating under the legal fiction of Mughal imperial authority long after that authority had effectively collapsed. These rupees were struck in the name of Shah Alam II, who had been blinded and humiliated by the Afghan warlord Ghulam Qadir in 1788 and ruled as a pensioner of the Marathas, then the Company itself, until his death in 1806.

The coins continued to be issued posthumously under his regnal formula, a common Company practice to avoid disrupting trade confidence in established coin types. Surat mint closed permanently in 1815.