Akbar II

Akbar II reigned for thirty years over a court, a fort and no territory, and his most consequential act was choosing the envoy who went to London to complain about it. He was the son of Shah Alam II, and succeeded in 1806 when the East India Company was already paying the imperial household a pension and administering Delhi in the emperor's name. He had no army and no revenue of his own. He conducted the ceremonial of the Mughal court with care, because the forms were the whole of what remained: the Company's governors-general were still, in Persian usage, servants of the throne, and Lord Hastings ended that by refusing to make the customary obeisance in 1813. The coinage stopped carrying his name; the Company downgraded him in its correspondence from emperor to King of Delhi. In 1830 he sent Rammohan Roy to England to argue for an increased stipend and gave him the title Raja for the purpose; Roy obtained a rise in the allowance and died at Bristol in 1833, and the mission is remembered less for its object than for being the first such journey by an Indian reformer of standing. Akbar's court kept Delhi as a literary capital: Mirza Ghalib, Zauq and Momin wrote under his patronage or his son's. He tried and failed to have his favourite son named heir over Bahadur Shah Zafar. He died in 1837, and his successor was the last emperor, deposed after 1857. His pension from the Company was around a hundred and twenty thousand rupees a year. He is buried near the shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, beside his father. The Company refused his request to have his stipend raised in his own lifetime, granting only what Roy had negotiated.

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