Sena Dynasty of Bengal

A Deccan chief's principality

formationDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

The Sena dynasty's own origins lay far from Bengal. Smith records its founder, a chief named Samantasena, as having come from the Deccan - one more instance of the migration that had carried warrior families across the subcontinent for centuries. Around the middle of the eleventh century Samantasena, or by some accounts his son Hemantasena, established a small principality at Kasipuri, identified with the modern town of Kasiari; neither man, by Smith's own account, achieved anything approaching real power, and the family's early history reads as little more than a minor Bengal chieftaincy among many under nominal Pala overlordship.

A grandson who took a kingdom

The real founding of the Sena dynasty as a historical power belongs to Samantasena's grandson, Vijayasena, who raised himself to independent sovereignty in the late eleventh or early twelfth century and wrested a large part of Bengal outright from the declining Pala kingdom. Vijayasena reigned some forty years, fought successful wars against other regional powers besides the Palas, and maintained friendly relations with Choraganga of Kalinga, whose own extraordinary seventy-one-year reign extended Kalinga's conquests into the far north of Orissa around the same period the Kaivarta rebellion was tearing the Pala kingdom apart from within. It was Vijayasena's own conquests, not his grandfather's modest principality, that gave the Senas the territory and standing his own son would inherit and reshape.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Koba-chan · CC BY-SA 3.0

Kulinism and a Brahmanical throne

peakDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

Vijayasena's conquests passed around 1108 to his son Vallalasena, remembered in Bengal tradition as Ballal Sen, whose own reputation rests less on further conquest than on remaking the society his father had won. He is credited with reorganizing the caste system and introducing the practice known as Kulinism among Brahmans, Baidyas and Kayasths - a hierarchy of ranked lineages within each caste that would shape Bengali social structure for centuries after the dynasty itself was gone. Some accounts credit him with founding the city of Gaur, also called Lakhnauti, though Smith judges the city likely predates him; a palace attributed to Ballal Sen is still pointed out at Rampal near Bikrampur in the Dacca district.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Amitabha Gupta · CC BY 4.0

A Hindu throne against a Buddhist rival

Every Sena king was a Brahmanical Hindu, in explicit contrast to the Buddhist Pala kings whose own territory the dynasty had taken - a religious distinction Smith reads as a real source of hostility between the two houses, sharpened by the Senas' own particular interest in maintaining caste distinctions the Palas had never enforced. Ballal Sen's own devotion ran to the Tantric strain of Hinduism, and Bengali genealogists credit him with sending Brahman missionaries as far afield as Magadha, Bhutan, Chittagong, Arakan, Orissa and Nepal - a religious reach that outstripped anything his father's own military conquests had achieved, and marked the high point of Sena influence over Bengal's own cultural and religious life, even as the dynasty's military position would prove, within two generations, far less durable than its social reforms.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · sailko · CC BY-SA 3.0

Eighteen horsemen at the gate

endDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

By the time the throne passed to Lakshmanasena in 1119, the Sena dynasty had ruled eastern Bengal for a generation as an established, respected power - Smith records the Muhammadan chronicler's own account of an aged king so widely revered that his family "was respected by all the Rais or chiefs of Hindustan," credited with the rank of hereditary spiritual head of the country and a reputation for justice and generosity that outlasted the accuracy of the eighty-year reign popularly, if erroneously, attributed to him. His court at Nadia, on the Bhagirathi river north of the future site of Calcutta, was already renowned as a seat of Hindu learning - the town still carries the name of a college district today.

A horse-trader's disguise

That standing collapsed in a single afternoon, probably in 1199. Muhammad, son of Bakhtiyar - already notorious across Bihar for a raiding campaign that had stormed the fortress-monastery of Bihar with just two hundred horsemen two years before, slaughtering its Buddhist monks so completely that no one literate in their own libraries' books could afterward be found - rode ahead of his main army with a party of only eighteen horsemen and entered Nadia unopposed, the population mistaking him for an ordinary horse-trader. At the gate of the royal palace he drew his sword and struck. The aged king, caught at his own dinner table, fled barefoot out the rear of the palace, abandoning his treasure, his household and his throne to an invader who had taken the Sena capital with a force smaller than a modest merchant caravan.

The dishonoured end

Lakshmanasena escaped to Bikrampur in the Dacca district, where he died still in exile; Muhammad destroyed Nadia itself and established his own new capital at the ancient city of Gaur, endowing mosques, colleges and monasteries there with the wealth his raid had seized, and sending a substantial share of the plunder on to his own overlord, Qutb al-Din. Smith's own verdict on the episode is unsparing: "the dishonoured end of the last Hindu kingdom" of Bengal - a dynasty that had spent a century and a half building a genuinely respected Brahmanical state, undone not by a matched army in open battle but by eighteen riders and the element of surprise.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 3.0