Sultanate of Bengal

Too far to govern

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)formation

Bengal was a Delhi province in name for over a century before it became one in fact, and the distance between the two conditions was mostly a matter of geography rather than politics.

A byword for disobedience

The country was too far from Delhi, and the climate too unforgiving for months at a stretch, for any sultan to reliably enforce obedience on whoever he sent to govern it. The loyalty of Bengal's governors became, in Haig's phrase, a byword at the capital — sometimes nominal, sometimes openly defiant, always contingent on how much military attention Delhi could actually spare for a province that took weeks to reach and longer to subdue. Royal titles were assumed more than once by governors who judged, correctly, that Delhi's response would be slow or absent. The first serious rebellion against a genuinely strong sultan came under Balban; the first unquestioned, lasting use of the royal title in Bengal came a generation later.

Two capitals, two claimants

The disintegration that produced a real independent kingdom took decades rather than a single declaration. By 1338 the province had effectively broken from Delhi's control. What followed was not one clean secession but years of rival claimants ruling separate halves of the delta from separate capitals — one at Sonargaon in the east, one at Lakhnawati and then Pandua in the west — assassinating, deposing and replacing each other while Delhi, consumed by Muhammad bin Tughluq's own catastrophic reign, had neither the will nor the resources to reassert control over any of them.

One throne, at last

It was Shams-ud-din Ilyas Shah — nicknamed Bhangara for his fondness for hemp preparations — who finally closed the gap between fragmentation and a real kingdom. Having assassinated his own foster-brother to take the western throne in 1345, he spent the following years defeating his eastern rival and, in 1352, took Sonargaon itself, uniting the whole of Muslim Bengal under a single crown for the first time since the province had first slipped from Delhi's grip. Firuz Tughluq marched against him in retaliation for raids into Tirhut and the frontier of Delhi's own territory, besieged him at his fortress retreat of Ikdala, and was forced to withdraw without extracting so much as formal recognition of his sovereignty. In December 1356 Firuz gave up the pretence and formally recognised Bengal's independence — a recognition whose gifts, delivered by envoy, arrived too late even to be presented, since Ilyas Shah had already died and been succeeded by his son before the mission reached Bihar.

Through golden cows

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)aside?What aside means

By the early fifteenth century real power in Bengal had passed, in substance if not in name, from the throne to a Hindu chieftain named Raja Ganesh — styled Raja Kans by most Muslim chroniclers — whose influence became dominant after he defeated the reigning sultan in 1404, even though he left no coins or inscriptions of his own and never openly claimed the crown.

A saint's ultimatum

Accounts of Ganesh's character conflict sharply. Some describe him as secretly sympathetic to Islam, others as tolerant, and the most detailed surviving account as an outright bigot whose persecution of Bengal's Muslims drove the saint Qutb-ul-Alam to invoke the aid of Ibrahim Shah of Jaunpur. Ibrahim invaded. Ganesh, in his terror, sought the saint's intercession — refused, on the grounds that a misbeliever's plea for mercy was not his to grant — and, casting about for an escape, offered his own son, Jadu, to Qutb-ul-Alam for conversion, so that the boy might be proclaimed king in his place and the whole country spared a religious war.

The dupe and the double-cross

The saint accepted the arrangement in good faith, prevailed on Ibrahim Shah to withdraw his army, and then discovered he had been played for a fool: Ganesh treated his own son's proclamation as a formality without substance, resumed and intensified his persecution of Muslims, and attempted to reclaim the boy back to his old faith. The convert's ceremonial purification — passed bodily through golden images of cows, afterward broken up and distributed to Brahmans as charity — had been costly and elaborate. It did not take. The young convert, whatever else had been done to and for him, refused to return to his father's religion, and was imprisoned for the refusal.

The persecuted becomes the persecutor

Qutb-ul-Alam lived to see his own miscalculation punish the very community he had tried to protect, forced to witness Muslims persecuted under his own failed guarantee. Death came to Ganesh in 1414, and the imprisoned convert was raised to the throne as Jalal-ud-din Muhammad — who turned on his father's faith with the particular ferocity of a man who had been locked away for refusing to abandon his own. The Brahmans who had staged his purification ceremony were forced to swallow the flesh of the animal they had used to cleanse him, a permanent defilement in payback for a rite that had failed to hold, and a reign of seventeen years followed in which, Haig judges, the numerical dominance of Islam across eastern Bengal — in a population with no plausible descent from conquering invaders to explain it otherwise — most likely took the shape it still has today.

Sidi Badr the Madman

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)aside?What aside means

For seventeen years before Husain Shah's accession in 1493, real power in Bengal belonged to African courtiers who had risen through the palace guard and the royal household — a run of dominance that produced three kings of African descent and ended only when the third of them was overthrown by his own minister.

A monopoly, then a murder

When the boy-king Nasir-ud-din Mahmud II came to the throne, administration fell to an African official titled Habash Khan, whose monopoly on power provoked the resentment of every other courtier competing for royal favour. One of them, another African known as Sidi Badr the Madman, killed him and took his place. Sidi Badr's ambitions were entirely self-interested. In 1490 he had the young king put to death and mounted the throne himself under the grandiloquent title Shams-ud-din Abu Nasr Muzaffar Shah.

A reign of purges, and one good decision

Muzaffar spent his three-year reign executing most of the kingdom's leading men. His single defensible act of judgement was the choice of a minister: Ala-ud-din Husain, a Sayyid of a family originally from Tirmiz on the Oxus, respected for his lineage, his ability and his character in roughly equal measure. Husain likely restrained the worst of Muzaffar's violence for as long as restraint was possible, but a ruler who both raised the burdens on his own people and cut the pay of his own army had made an enemy of the one institution his survival actually depended on. Worn down by the tyranny his position implicitly endorsed, Husain withdrew his support — and found himself, without seeking it, at the head of an open revolt.

What the nobles chose instead

The rebel troops besieged Muzaffar in Gaur for four months. He died leading a desperate sortie from the fortress rather than surrendering it. The nobles who had followed Husain into rebellion then elected him king in 1493, on terms Haig compares, only half in jest, to a European constitutional settlement — guarantees extracted from the new ruler before the throne was handed to him, rather than assumed to be his by simple right of conquest. It was the closest thing to a negotiated succession Bengal had produced in generations, and it ended, at last, the run of kings whose claim to the throne had rested on nothing sturdier than control of the palace guard.

The guards disbanded

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)peak

Husain Shah began his reign by restoring basic order in a capital his own followers had spent four months besieging, punishing plunderers severely enough that the booty recovered from them refilled the royal treasury, and then set about reforms aimed squarely at the two mechanisms that had let the previous seventeen years happen at all.

Disarming the guard, expelling the kingmakers

The first target was the paik, a corps of Hindu infantry that had served as palace and royal guards for generations and had gradually acquired a position Haig compares directly to the Praetorian Guard at Rome — able to make and break emperors by controlling access to the one person whose safety determined everyone else's. Husain disbanded most of the corps and posted the remainder far from the capital, replacing them with Muslim troops answerable, in practice as well as in theory, to the crown.

The second reform was blunter: the wholesale expulsion of every African from the kingdom. Their numbers had grown large enough, and their recent taste of real power sharp enough, that Husain judged the risk of a permanent African ruling caste too dangerous to leave unaddressed. The exiles sought refuge in Delhi and Jaunpur, where their reputation preceded them too thoroughly to be welcome, and most drifted instead to the Deccan and Gujarat, where men of African descent had already been employed in large numbers for years and one more wave of arrivals raised no particular alarm.

An old rival's last refuge

In 1495 Husain Shah of Jaunpur, driven from his own kingdom by Sikandar Lodi, arrived in Bengal as a refugee and was given honourable accommodation at Kahalgaon, where he lived out his remaining years until his death in 1500 — one deposed dynasty's last king finding shelter, by simple coincidence of name, at the court of a very different Husain Shah whose own kingdom was, at that moment, near the height of its power.

What thirty years of order actually built

With the capital secured and the routes to power narrowed back down to ordinary service rather than palace intrigue, Husain Shah turned outward: recovering provinces that six disordered preceding reigns had let slip away, pushing the frontier as far as Orissa, and in 1498 invading Assam against Nilambar, last king of the Khen dynasty. It was, on the evidence of what both the Africans before him and the dynasty after him managed, the one stretch of the whole sultanate's history when court intrigue and military strength were pointed in the same direction rather than working against each other — and Haig's own judgement ranks him, with the single exception of the dynasty's founder a century and a half earlier, the greatest of all the Muslim kings who ever ruled Bengal.

The gate of Bengal

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)end

Ghiyas-ud-din Mahmud Shah took the throne in 1533 by usurping his own nephew, whom Sher Shah — then still an obscure Afghan officer — had been permitted to wield near-royal power over. The usurpation immediately drew him into a war he had not chosen and could not really afford: his own brother-in-law rebelled in alliance with Sher Khan Sur, an Afghan who had been steadily building an independent power base in neighbouring Bihar since the death of its previous ruler.

A dangerous ally's first taste of Bengal's wealth

The two rebels defeated and killed the governor Mahmud sent against them, and Sher Khan came away from the victory with elephants, war material and treasure substantial enough to fund a serious expansion of his own power. When his former partner rose again without him and was crushed, Sher Khan marched on Bengal himself to avenge the death — and found, at the natural chokepoint between the Rajmahal hills and the Ganges known as the Gate of Bengal, a defence stiffened for a full month by Mahmud's own Portuguese captives, who preferred a fighting chance at freedom to indefinite captivity.

The siege that starvation decided

The gate eventually gave way, Mahmud's main army was beaten in the field, and Sher Khan besieged him in Gaur itself. The siege pressed on even through a fresh rising in Bihar, which Sher Khan suppressed in person while leaving his son and a trusted officer to keep the pressure on the capital. Famine inside the walls did what direct assault had not: on 6 April 1538 Mahmud led his starving garrison out in one last attack, was defeated and put to flight, and watched his sons captured as Gaur was sacked and occupied.

What Sher Khan did with the conquest

Sher Khan pursued the fleeing Mahmud, defeated and wounded him again, and entered Gaur in triumph to assume the royal title for himself. Mahmud fled to Humayun for protection — the Mughal emperor had, in fact, already used Sher Khan's preoccupation with Bengal to seize Chunar from his officers — and died at Kahalgaon while Humayun's own relief force was still on its way, having just learned that Sher Khan had executed both his sons. The Sayyid dynasty Husain Shah had built into Bengal's golden age ended there, in a fortress its own last king had fled to rather than defended, and Sher Khan went on, within two years, to defeat Humayun himself at Chausa and drive the Mughal emperor out of Hindustan entirely — resources first won, in the end, at the Gate of Bengal.