Akbar Adil Shah

Akbar Adil Shah

A Rupee of Allahabad Struck in the Name of Akbar Adil Shah, A New Moghul Emperor for Numismatics

Jan Lingen & Paul Stevens

Introduction

An earlier paper [1] examined the operation of the mint at Allahabad following the ceding of the territory to the British by the Nawab Vizier of Awadh in 1801. Since that time another rupee of the Allahabad mint has come to our attention, and this coin appeared to contradict the information from the records of the EIC that had been used in above cited paper. Further investigation, reported in this paper, revealed that this coin was almost certainly not struck by the British at Allahabad, and other options for the authority responsible for issuing the coin were investigated. Having eliminated all the possibilities, one of us (Lingen) came up with the idea that this coin may have been issued in the name of a little known Moghul Emperor to whom no coins have previously been attributed.

This paper is the story of the investigation that led to this exciting conclusion.

The coin

The coin was first mentioned by Dr Shailendra Bhandare from an example that he had acquired for the Ashmolean collection, and subsequently two examples were examined in private collections. These latter two coins (shown above), at least, appear to be from the same dies. The coin is also listed as KM 764 in the Krause/Mishler catalogue. This may be from the Ashmolean coin.

The obverse legend reads:

Sikka zad dar Jahan ba Fazl-i-Alah Shah Alam Panah Akbar Shah (Struck coin in the world by the grace of the almighty, the King and Refuge of the World, Akbar Shah) [2].

The reverse bears the standard legend with the mintname Allahabad and the regnal year Ahd (RY 1).

At first, the obverse legend was taken to be a reference to Muhammad Akbar II and the investigation focused on the possibilities of when, and by whom, a rupee could have been issued in the name of this Emperor.

The British and Allahabad

When the British acquired Allahabad in 1801 the mint does not appear to have been open, because it was re-opened, by the British, in 1802. Two types of rupee were issued, the Lucknow rupee and the Shumshari rupee but in 1804 it was discovered that the coins had been debased and that the Collector, Richard Ahmuty, knew about this. He was dismissed from his post and the mint was closed in 1804 with the dies being sent to Calcutta.

Incidentally, we notice that the Krause Mishler catalogue assigns all Allahabad rupees with the regnal year 26, to the British. This is incorrect. Only coins showing AH dates of 1216 and later would fall under the authority of the EIC.

Muhammad Akbar II came to the throne in November 1806, following the death of his father, Shah Alam II. It seems extremely unlikely that the British would have authorised the striking of a new coin at their Allahabad mint, following the disastrous experience that they had had only two years before.

Furthermore, in April 1805, the Governor General had decided that a new rupee should be issued for the newly acquired territories and that this should be produced at Farrukhabad. The records state that the Governor General:

has determined on the immediate introduction of a new silver and copper currency, of an uniform weight and standard, into the provinces ceded by the Nawaub Vizier to the English East India Company, and into the conquered provinces in the Doab and on the right bank of the river Jumna, including the zillah of Bundlecund, to be denominated the Lucknow sicca rupee of the 45^th sun, struck at Farrukhabad, corresponding in weight and standard with the rupee at present struck at Lucknow, in the dominions of the Nawaub Vizier, and thence denominated the Lucknow rupee, and to select the town of Farrukhabad to be the place at which a mint shall be established for striking the new silver and copper coin to be established in the said provinces.

I am further directed to acquaint you that His Excellency in Council has been pleased to appoint the Judge and Magistrate of zillah Farrukhabad for the time being, and the Agent or Acting Agent to the Governor General at Farrukhabad for the time being, to be a committee for the superintendence of the business of the mint at that station, and to appoint Mr Robert Blake to the joint offices of Mint and Assay master for the immediate conduct of the business of the mint at Farrukhabad, subject to the authority of the Mint Committee, above mentioned.

So the idea of re-opening the Allahabad mint in 1806/07 seems even less likely. An official British issue from the Allahabad mint can therefore almost certainly be ruled out.

A Second Possibility

When the mint closed, the local workmen would have been dismissed but most of them would probably have remained in the area. They would have had all the skills necessary to produce a rupee in the name of the new Emperor and perhaps they hoped to demonstrate their ability in the hope that the mint might be re-opened. They might have produced a few coins for this purpose but would have found their desires frustrated because of the plan to introduce the Farrukhabad rupee.

Against this argument is the fact that all the earlier rupees of Allahabad have a fish on the reverse and some have a sword on the obverse, whilst the Muhammad Akbar coin has neither of these. If the coin was produced by the old workers of the mint, one might expect elements of the old design to be present. Furthermore, the legend on the obverse of the coin differs from the standard legend of Muhammad Akbar II, and one might expect that the standard legend would have been copied. This possibility, therefore, also seems unlikely.

Muhammad Akbar’s First Reign

In 2003, Shailendra Bhandare wrote a fascinating paper on the first reign of Muhammad Akbar II [3]. To briefly recap the background history: in 1788, the Rohilla chieftain, Ghulam Qadir, seized Dehli, deposed and blinded the Emperor, Shah Alam II, and raised Bidar Bakht to the throne. Subsequently, Ghulam Qadir replaced Bidar Bakht with Muhammad Akbar II, as his puppet emperor, and rupees, inter alia, were struck in the name of this emperor at Shahjahanabad and Saharanpur. These coins show the regnal year Ahd and the hijri year 1202 or 1203.

The question then arises, could the rupee of Allahabad have been struck at this time?

Unfortunately the hijri date is not visible on the obverse of the known specimens, so we have to think about the political affiliations of the ruler of Allahabad, with Ghulam Qadir. In 1788, Allahabad was part of the territories of the Nawab Vizier of Awadh, and he had no love for Ghulam Qadir, so it seems unlikely that he would have authorised the issue of a coin in the name of this puppet emperor. Furthermore, why would he issue such a coin from only one of his mints?

A second observation that must weigh against this coin being issued during the first reign of Muhammad Akbar, is the different obverse legend. The known coins of this first reign have the legend:

Sikka zad dar jahan ba Fazl-i-Alah Hami Din Muhammad Akbar Shah (Struck coin the world by the grace of the Almighty, Defender of the Faith, Muhammad Akbar Shah);

or alternatively: Hami-i-Din-Muhammad Akbar Shah (Defender of the faith of Muhammad, Akbar Shah), different from the legend on the coin reported here.

So this third possibility also seems very unlikely.

Akbar Adil Shah

Having eliminated all the apparent possibilities for Muhammad Akbar II, the idea emerged that perhaps the Akbar Shah inscribed on the coins was not Muhammad Akbar II, and that perhaps another Akbar Shah, in whose name the coins had been struck, had existed. The search for this ‘new’ Akbar Shah revealed the following information:

Safdar Jang was the wazir (first minister) of the Moghul Emperor Ahmed Shah Bahadur [4]. In 1752 and early 1753 Safdar Jang, through a series of intrigues, succeeded in isolating the Emperor so that only he and his supporters could gain access to the Imperial presence. He then proceeded to abrogate to himself all the power and money to which he could gain access, at the same time ignoring all the needs of the Empire. This obviously turned many of the nobles of the Imperial court against him and on 26^th March 1753 these nobles succeeded in removing Safdar Jang from Dehli. After some negotiation, Safdar Jang decided to re-establish his position by force and on 9^th May 1753, his troops plundered old Dehli. This was the start of a civil war that lasted until November.

Following the start of this war, on 13^th May 1753, Ahmad Shah Bahadur dismissed Safdar Jang from his position as wazir and replaced him with another noble. Safdar Jang’s removal from this important position, meant that he lost much of his power of patronage and he retaliated by raising a boy to the throne, claiming that this boy was the son of Kam Baksh, who was, in turn, son of the Emperor Aurangzeb. This puppet Emperor was given the title Akbar Adil Shah (Akbar Shah the just). Safdar Jang was then able to declare himself wazir once more, although this time as wazir to his own puppet Emperor.

The war that followed was poorly executed on both sides. At first, Safdar Jang seemed to be in the ascendant, but after the arrival of the Rohillas, under Najib Khan, the Imperial side gained the advantage. However, the Emperor refused to take the necessary steps for the final defeat of Safdar Jang and the war rather faded out. This feud between Ahmad Shah and Safdar Jang appears finally to have been resolved after the intervention of the Kachhawa ruler of Jaipur, Madho Singh, and the Jat, Suraj Mal. Agreement seems to have been reached by early November because, on 7th November 1753, Safdar Jang is reported to have begun to move away from Dehli and towards Awadh, of which he was the Nawab, initially with the puppet Emperor in his entourage. At some point, he sent Akbar Adil Shah towards Agra in the charge of Amar Singh, one of his trusted retainers. What happened to the puppet Emperor after this is not clear, but he disappears from the known records.

Safdar Jang died on 5^th October 1754 at a place named Paparghat on the river Gomti, leaving his son, Shuja-ud-Daula as Nawab of Awadh.

This brief background history gives us a potential candidate for the ‘Akbar Shah’ found on the coins under discussion, namely the puppet emperor raised to the throne by Safdar Jang, and nominally ruling from 13^th May to 5^th Novemeber 1753 (AH 1166).

As has been mentioned, Safdar Jang was, inter alia, the Nawab of Awadh, and the subah of Allahabad had been added to his territory in 1748. At that time, Raja Nawal Rai was appointed deputy governor of Awadh and Allahabad but after his death in 1751, two separate Naibs were appointed: Muhammad Quli Khan for Awadh and Ali Quli Khan for Allahabad.

Two mints were reasonably active within Safdar Jang’s territory at the time of the civil war: Allahabad and Benares with Benares under the control of Raja Balwant Singh. Having appointed a new Emperor, it seems extremely likely that Safdar Jang would have wanted the mints under his control to issue coins in the name of this Emperor, not in the name of Ahmad Shah, because the minting of coins was an important symbol of kingship.

The current coin under discussion would fit neatly into this picture, but there are one or two outstanding issues with this proposal that require further discussion.

Firstly, the name on the coin is inscribed as ‘Akbar Shah’ not ‘Akbar Adil Shah’ as he is named by the historians of the events of the time. However, it is not unusual for the name of the Emperor to appear on coins in a shortened form, so this does not pose a serious challenge to the attribution. Furthermore it is likely that the word ‘adil’ was removed because it would have been incompatible with the meter of the rhyming couplet. The couplet on Akbar Shah's coins is in the same meter as that of Ahmad Shah Bahadur⁴. Ahmad Shah's couplet runs:

Sikka zad bar zar ba-Fazl Alah

Shah-i-Alam Panah Ahmed Shah

whilst that on Akbar Shah's coin goes:

Sikka zad dar Jahan ba-Fazl Alah

Shah-i-Alam Panah Akbar Shah]

The second outstanding issue concerns the mint of Benares. If this mint was under Safdar Jang’s control, and was operational (which it was), surely this mint would have issued coins in the name of the new emperor? Further study of this point revealed that at this time the Raja of Benares, Raja Balwant Singh, was in fact in rebellion against his overlord, Safdar Jang, and it was not until after the civil war that Shuja-ud-Daula regained control of this town [5]. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that coins were not issued from Benares in the name of the puppet Emperor. This means that the only operational mint fully under the control of Safdar Jang was Allahabad, the mint name on the coins under discussion.

The third and final outstanding point is to address the question of whether or not coins exist in the name of Ahmad Shah Bahadur with the mintname Allahabad, issued during this period of civil war. If such coins were to exist, then our whole proposition would break down, because Safdar Jang would certainly not issue coins in the name of both Emperors.

Coins of Allahabad are known for 1166/6 (KM 446.4), but we need to determine how the regnal and hijri dates fit with the period under consideration.

AD Date		AH Date	Regnal Year
Mar-53		1166	6
Apr-53		1166	6
May-53	Civil War	1166	6
Jun-53	Civil War	1166	6
Jul-53	Civil War	1166	6
Aug-53	Civil War	1166	6
Sep-53	Civil War	1166	6
Oct-53	Civil War	1166	6
Nov-53	Civil War	1167	6
Dec-53		1167	6
Jan-54		1167	6
Feb-54		1167	6

The above table shows that coins could have been issued with the date 1166/6, in the name of Ahmad Shah, before the civil war started. Also coins dated 1167/6 (if they exist), could have been issued after the civil war. Altogether then, the dates do not really provide very much useful evidence one way or the other.

Conclusion

The rupee of Allahabad issued in the first year of an Emperor named Akbar Shah, the Just, is unlikely to be an official issue of Muhammad Akbar II, either from his first brief reign, or from the British after they acquired the mint. Nor is it likely to be an unofficial issue made by moneyers in Allahabad after the enthronement of Muhammad Akbar II in 1806/7.

This coin was issued, almost certainly, in the name of a puppet Emperor, whom we have called Akbar Adil Shah, under the control of Safdar Jang, Nawab of Awadh, after the latter fell out with the emperor Ahmad Shah Bahadur in 1753.

Thus we believe that we have identified a coin issued in the name of a Moghul Emperor, albeit an ephemeral puppet, not previously known to have issued coins.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Shailen Bhandare for his enormous help in posing challenging ideas and making many helpful suggestions. Also Barry Tabor for reviewing various parts of the script and making many useful suggestions.

References