Akbar II

Did You Know?

• Akbar II is credited with starting the Hindu–Muslim unity festival Phool Walon Ki Sair.
• After the mutiny, cousins of Mirza Mughal, son of Bahadur Shah Zafar, escaped to neighbouring areas fearing British capture.
• Prince Mirza Mughal, the heir apparent, was captured and executed by the British near Delhi gate.

Early life

Born on 22 April 1760 in Mukundpur, Satna, while his father Shah Alam II was in exile, Prince Mirza Akbar became crown prince with the title Wali Ahd Bahadur at the Red Fort on 2 May 1781, following his elder brother's death. He served as viceroy of Delhi from 1782 to 1799. In 1788, when Rohilla leader Ghulam Qadir seized Delhi, the young prince was compelled to perform a nautch dance and saw the imperial family humiliated and starved.

Reign

Emperor Akbar II ruled over an empire that was vast in name only, with his real authority confined to Delhi's Red Fort. During his time, the city's cultural scene thrived. His insistence on meeting British officials like Lord Hastings as a sovereign rather than a subordinate angered the British, who saw him as a dependent. In 1835, they demoted his official title to 'King of Delhi', stopped acting as representatives of the Mughal Empire, and removed his name from coins, replacing Persian script with English. To weaken his standing, the British pushed the Nawab of Oudh and the Nizam of Hyderabad to claim royal titles; the Nizam declined, but the Nawab of Awadh accepted. Akbar II granted the title of Nawab to the rulers of Tonk and Jaora. He also named the Bengali reformer Ram Mohan Roy as his envoy to Britain, giving him the title Raja, but Roy's petition to the British court on the emperor's behalf failed. Akbar II's tomb is a marble enclosure next to the Moti Masjid, near the shrine of the 13th-century Sufi saint Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki in Mehrauli, Delhi. The graves of Bahadur Shah I and Shah Alam II are also located there.