Shah Alam II

Shah Alam II (25 June 1728 – 19 November 1806), born Mirza Ali Gauhar, was Mughal emperor from 1760 to 1788 and again from 1788 to 1806 — the emperor who, after Buxar, granted the East India Company the Diwani of Bengal, and who was blinded by his own prisoner Ghulam Qadir in 1788 ¹.

A son of Alamgir II, he fled Delhi as a prince in 1758 and was proclaimed emperor in exile in December 1759 ¹. After the confederate defeat at Buxar in October 1764 he came to terms at Allahabad in August 1765, granting the Company the Diwani — the revenue administration of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha — in return for a pension and the districts of Kora and Allahabad ¹. He returned to Delhi in January 1772 under Maratha protection and reigned there as an increasingly pensioned sovereign, while real power passed between Mahadaji Shinde and, in the crisis of 1788, the Rohilla chief Ghulam Qadir, who seized Delhi and blinded him ¹. Restored by Shinde, he lived on under Maratha and then, after 1803, British protection, dying at Delhi on 19 November 1806; his grave lies beside the dargah of Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki at Mehrauli ¹.

Under the pen name Aftab he wrote a Diwan of Persian and Urdu verse and Ajaib-ul-Qasas, counted among the earliest works of Urdu prose ¹.

Shah Alam II's legal school is unattested in the sources consulted. The English article's infobox gives Sunni Islam (Hanafi) ¹, but the Arabic article's infobox gives Islam only ² and Wikidata likewise records Islam generically ³; the Mughal court's Hanafi tradition is the context of his reign, not an attestation about the man.

The English article and Wikidata agree at day precision on both his birth (25 June 1728) and his death (19 November 1806) ^{1 3}. His father Alamgir II has a draft record in the museum, to which the child edge here points. His son Akbar II, who succeeded him, is a later row of the same harvest queue and has no record yet, so no edge to him is recorded from this side.