Shah Alam II

Shah Alam II reigned as Mughal emperor for forty-seven years, was blinded by one of his own protectors, and is the emperor of the couplet saying his realm ran from Delhi to Palam - about ten miles. He inherited a title rather than an empire in 1759, spent his first twelve years as a wanderer, and made the decisive mistake early: at Buxar in 1764 he was on the losing side against the East India Company, and the Treaty of Allahabad the following year granted the Company the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa - the right to collect the revenue of the richest provinces in India. That document, signed at a table in a tent, is where British territorial rule properly begins, and it was signed by the emperor. He lived under Company protection at Allahabad until 1772, then accepted a Maratha escort back to Delhi, where Mahadaji Shinde restored him and governed in his name. In 1788 the Rohilla chief Ghulam Kadir seized the palace, held the family for weeks, and put out the emperor's eyes with a knife; Shinde retook the city and executed him. Shah Alam remained on the throne, blind, until the British took Delhi in 1803 and pensioned him. He wrote poetry in Urdu and Persian under the name Aftab. The couplet about his realm running from Delhi to Palam is quoted in almost every account of the period and is of uncertain authorship. His son Akbar II succeeded him under British pension, and his grandson Bahadur Shah Zafar was the last emperor, deposed after 1857. The diwani grant of 1765 is displayed in facsimile in several Indian museums as the document that began colonial rule.

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