Rupee - Ahmed Shah Bahadur Katak mint

By 1819, the Maratha Empire was a spent force. The Third Anglo-Maratha War effectively ended Maratha political power in 1818, yet mints under residual Maratha control continued striking rupees in the name of the Mughal emperor Ahmed Shah Bahadur — dead since 1775 — a legal fiction that had persisted for decades to give coinage nominal legitimacy. Katak, in Odisha, had passed through Maratha hands after being wrested from the Nawab of Bengal in the eighteenth century.

This piece belongs to the very end of that arrangement. Within months of this issue, British paramountcy made such independent minting politically untenable.