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The Afghan Age, 1537–1612
The Mughal conquest of Bengal did not occur at once. Although the entry of imperial forces into the Bengali capital on September 25, 1574, would appear to have been decisive, the conquest actually took three-quarters of a century to accomplish, commencing as far back as 1537 and continuing until 1612. The intervening period may be called the Afghan Age, a period when migrants hailing ultimately from Afghanistan, but more immediately from Upper India, held de facto control over much or most of the countryside. In the mid fifteenth century, Afghans had replaced Turks as the Delhi sultanate’s ruling class. But in 1526 another Turk from Central Asia, Babur, dislodged the last Afghan ruling house from Delhi and established his own house—the Indo-Timurids, or Mughals. As a result, thousands of refugee Afghans flocked down the Gangetic Plain into Biharand Bengal, where they established themselves as warrior chieftains (see map 4).
Bengal’s Sultan Nasir al-Din Nusrat Shah (1519–32), who seems to have understood the long-term significance of Babur’s conquest of Delhi, encouraged the buildup of Afghans in Bihar in order that it might serve as a buffer region between himself and the new Mughal dynasty. But the king’s younger brother and successor, Mahmud Shah (1532–38), proved less wise. In 1533 the new sultan sent an army into Bihar to punish one of his governors for having meddled in the succession dispute that had broken out upon his brother’s death. This governor, however, was allied with one of the most brilliant warriors of the age, the Afghan chieftain Sher Khan Sur (d. 1545). Seeking revenge against Sultan Mahmud, Sher Khan in 1535 skirted the sultan’s defenses in the northwestern delta and dashed straight to the capital of Gaur. There he boldly confronted Mahmud, forcing the sultan to concede all territories west of Rajmahal and to pay an annual tribute of 900,000 tankas.[2] Two years later, when the sultan refused to pay his annual tribute, and even had the Afghan’s collector brutally killed, Sher Khan, who by now styled himself Sher Shah, sent his generals into the delta and toppled Mahmud’s tottering throne.[3]
About this time, in 1538, Babur’s son Humayun, the successor to the Mughal throne, had marched a large army down the Gangetic Plain with a view to halting the ascendancy of the Afghans in eastern India. But Sher Shah merely melted into the Bihar interior, allowing Humayun an easy occupation of the Bengal capital.[4] The next year when news reached Humayun that rebellions threatened his own capital, the emperor, notwithstanding that the monsoon rains had already submerged much of the delta, entrusted the newly won province to subordinate officers and hastily set off for North India. Sher Shah seized this moment to pounce on Humayun, soundly defeating the emperor at the battle of Chausa in western Bihar (June 7, 1539). From there the Afghan leader went on to dislodge the Mughals not only from Bengal but from Delhi as well, in the process driving the hapless Humayun out of India altogether. For the next sixteen years the whole of northern and eastern India, including Bengal, fell to Afghan domination.
In 1556, however, Humayun managed to reconquer Delhi from Sher Shah’s successors. Once again, large numbers of Afghans from North India sought refuge in Bengal, then ruled by remnants of the house of Sher Shah, and after 1564 by the house of another Afghan leader, Taj Khan Karrani (1564–65).[5] The situation became acute in the 1560s, when Mughal power under the brilliant leadership of Akbar (1565–1605), the dynasty’s greatest empire builder, began expanding all over North India. Aware of the threat the Mughals would inevitably pose for Bengal, Taj Karrani’s successor, Sultan Sulaiman Karrani (1565–72), adopted a posture of outward submissiveness vis-à-vis the powerful emperor, arranging that Akbar’s name be included both on his coins and in the sermons of his mosques.[6] Meanwhile, his pragmatic prime minister, Lodi Khan, took care to placate the Mughals with gifts and banqueting.
Yet all the while, Sultan Sulaiman continued to gather more Afghans around him and to acquire treasure and elephants. In 1568 he launched an expedition to Orissa, ruled then by the last independent Hindu house in North India, and sacked the largest and wealthiest Hindu temple in eastern India, that of Jagannath in Puri.[7] This outbreak of royally sponsored temple desecration would appear to have departed from the de facto policy, honored by centuries of Muslim rulers in Bengal, of respect for non-Muslim monuments. But Sultan Sulaiman’s motives were clearly political in nature, not religious. Just before the expedition was launched, the raja of Orissa, Mukunda Deva (1557–68), had entered into a pact with Akbar, Sulaiman’s nominal overlord but actually his ultimate enemy. What is more, the raja had given refuge to Sulaiman’s bitter rival for the Bengal throne, Ibrahim Sur, and had suggested to Akbar’s envoy that he would gladly assist Ibrahim in his ambitions to conquer Bengal.[8] As Sulaiman could hardly have tolerated threats to the stability of his regime emanating from such a nearby quarter, his expedition to Orissa with a view to punishing Mukunda Deva appears understandable. Moreover, the Jagannath temple was no ordinary temple. As the focus of a state cult lavishly supported by the kings of Orissa’s Gajapati dynasty, this monument was the architectural representation of the continuity and integrity of that dynasty.[9] Its destruction was thus a calculated act of realpolitik. Like Muslim and Hindu sovereigns in India generally, the Karranis understood that a state temple—usually a single, well-endowed monument in a raja’s principal capital—was the visible manifestation of dynastic kingship, and that its destruction or looting was a logical and necessary aspect of extirpating a Hindu dynasty.[10]
But the Orissa campaign would be the last foreign adventure undertaken by an independent sovereign of Bengal. In October 1572, Sulaiman died, and Akbar, with almost unseemly haste, began preparations for an invasion. The emperor’s official historian, Abu’l-fazl, who generally viewed the expansion of Mughal power as a sign of his patron’s benevolence to mankind, wrote that the decision was taken “because the [Bengali] peasantry were suffering from the dominion of the evil Afghans.”[11] But a more likely reason is found in the vicious and self-destructive fratricide that broke out immediately upon Sulaiman’s death, creating a political void that the Mughals could not resist exploiting. Moreover, continued Abu’l-fazl, whereas Sulaiman had at least possessed the tact to wear “an outer garment of submission” to Akbar, his son Daud, who soon emerged in effective control of the government, had rent even this “scarf of hypocrisy.”[12] That is to say Daud, unlike his father, had begun striking coins and having the khuṭba read in his own name, either of which was tantamount to a formal declaration of independence.
In response, Akbar in 1574 personally led a large army down the Ganges plain to Patna, whose Afghan defenders he completely routed. He then entrusted the Bengal operation to an army of 20,000 led by his veteran commander, Mun‘im Khan, who advanced rapidly down the Ganges as the Afghans, dispirited and unwilling to resist, fled clear to their capital of Tanda.[13] This too they yielded without a struggle. In September 1574, when Mun‘im Khan triumphantly entered Tanda, the Mughal era in Bengal can be said to have begun. As Abu’l-fazl proudly wrote, “the words of the world-cherishing prince came into operation. The Divine graciousness increased daily.”[14]