1 Rupee - Wajid Ali Muhammadabad Banaras mint

Wajid Ali Shah's reign over Awadh lasted barely a decade before the East India Company annexed the kingdom in February 1856, citing misgovernance — a charge widely regarded, then and now, as a pretext for absorbing one of the subcontinent's wealthiest remaining princely states. The Banaras mint had operated under Nawabi authority since the mid-eighteenth century, its output a persistent assertion of fiscal independence from Company pressure.

KM#365.1 distinguishes this piece from parallel issues of the same reign struck at Lucknow. The Muhammadabad Banaras mint closed definitively with annexation, making the window for this type a hard stop at 1856.