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The Rise of Mughal Power in Bengal
The country of Bengal is a land where, owing to the climate’s favouring the base, the dust of dissension is always rising.
In the late sixteenth century, a dynasty of Chaghatai Turks commonly known as the Mughals annexed Bengal to their vast Indian empire, thereby ending the delta’s long isolation from North India. As just one among twelve provinces, Bengal was now administered by a class of imperial officials who, regularly rotated through the realm, shared a larger, pan-Indian view of their political mission. Unlike the later rulers of the sultanate, the new ruling class lacked attachments to Bengal and its culture. This served to widen the gulf between ashrāf Muslims, identified with the new wave of outsiders who swept into the delta after the conquest, and non-ashrāf Muslims, increasingly identified as native Bengali Muslims. Economically, the advent of Mughal rule greatly stimulated the production of manufactured goods in Bengal, especially of exports to the imperial court in North India. The conquest also furthered the exploitation and settlement of Bengal’s forested hinterlands, a process that greatly altered the delta’s social landscape. All of these forces, and especially the last, were to have enduring significance for the evolution of Islam and Muslim society in Bengal.
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The Afghan Age in Bengal, 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.
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. 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.
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). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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.” 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.” 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. 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.”
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The Early Mughal Experience in Bengal, 1574–1610
But seizing the capital and possessing the land were two different matters. While Mun‘im Khan and Raja Todar Mal, Akbar’s finance minister, were in Tanda reorganizing the revenue administration of the newly conquered province, thousands of Afghans melted into the forested Bengali hinterland, where for the next forty years they continued to hold out against the new regime. There they attracted a host of dissidents, including Muslim and Hindu zamīndārs, Portuguese renegades, and tribal chieftains, all of whom perceived the Chaghatai Turks from Upper India as foreigners and usurpers.
From Abu’l-fazl’s imperial perspective, however, the years after 1574 were devoted to clearing the delta of “the weeds and rubbish of opposition” khas-o-khāshāk-i mukhālif). Having seized Tanda, the Mughal victors pursued the Afghans in four directions: north to Ghoraghat, south to Satgaon, east to Sonargaon, and southeast into Fatehabad (present-day Faridpur town). These initial campaigns witnessed several pitched battles of great scope and bloodshed, in particular the battle of Tukaroi in southern Midnapur District (March 3, 1575), in which Todar Mal and Mun‘im Khan achieved a stunning victory over Sultan Daud Khan.
On this occasion the Mughals resorted to terror tactics, filling eight lofty minarets with the skulls of their slain enemies “as a warning to spectators.” Actually, though, the use of such violence was exceptional. With their cavalry bogged down in unfamiliar jungle terrain and their troops close to deserting from lack of interest in fighting so far from home, the Mughals relied more on bribery, cajolery, diplomacy, impressive displays of military power, and sowing the seeds of dissension within enemy ranks than upon the application of brute force.
Such a policy was not only expedient. It also accorded with Akbar’s theory of imperial sovereignty, which, as in traditional Indian political thought, aimed not at annihilating adversaries but at humbling them into recognizing the single, overarching sovereignty of the victorious monarch. Hence on April 12, 1575, there was great celebration in the Mughal camp when Sultan Daud Khan, finally perceiving the futility of continued resistance, appeared before Mun‘im Khan and partook of a formal “banquet of reconciliation.” Here was a political rite, a ritual of incorporation, in which symbolism was everything.
Displaying warm affection, the Mughal general advanced to the edge of the carpet laid out in a ceremonial tent specially arranged for the occasion. There he greeted the defeated king. Daud ungirded his sword and set it aside. Mun‘im Khan then presented the Afghan with a Mughal sword, an embroidered belt, and a cloak. Whether or not the cloak had actually been worn by Akbar, by donning it Daud Khan became ritually “incorporated” into the body of the emperor—a political rite the Bengali ruler would well have understood, since his predecessors on the throne of Gaur had followed the same practice. Adorned with Mughal regalia, Daud then turned his face in the direction of Akbar’s capital in Fatehpur Sikri and solemnly prostrated himself. His independence formally ended, Daud and his kingdom were now bound to the emperor.
Several events, however, prevented the new province’s smooth integration into the Mughal domain. Soon after returning to northern Bengal from Tukaroi, Mun‘im Khan transferred the seat of government from Tanda, capital of Bengal since the time of Sulaiman Karrani (1565), back to the ancient city of Gaur. The decision proved catastrophic, for a shift in the main course of the Ganges River had turned the river’s formerly swift channels into stagnant backwaters, making them breeding grounds for easily communicable diseases. As a result, in the months after April 1575 a devastating plague carried away thousands of Mughal officers and soldiers, not to mention untold thousands of civilians.
“The thought of death took hold of everyone,” wrote Abu’l-fazl, as the plague’s devastation swiftly cut into the morale of officers and troops. Many of these became altogether disgusted with Bengal and began thinking only of gathering their belongings and leaving. We have no figures on how many died during the plague of 1575, or how many left the country. But coming as it did at the very dawn of the Mughal encounter with Bengal, a critical moment in the formation of Mughal perceptions of the delta, this catastrophe surely contributed to the stereotype, soon accepted throughout the imperial service, that Bengal was a hostile and foreign land.
It was in this melancholy atmosphere, in October 1575, that Mun‘im Khan died. The infighting among Mughal officers that followed the governor’s death encouraged Daud Khan, the last independent sultan of Bengal, to reconsider his submission to Akbar and regroup his scattered Afghan forces for a second try at dislodging the Mughals from the delta. In these circumstances, Akbar appointed another decorated Mughal commander, Khan Jahan, to take charge of the newly won province.
Accompanied by the veteran Raja Todar Mal, the new governor reached the restored capital of Tanda in November, and in the following July met Daud’s forces along the banks of the Padma River in central Bengal. Again the Afghans suffered a crushing military reversal. Their finest field commander was killed in action, and Daud himself, his horse stuck in the monsoon’s muddy quagmire, was taken alive.
This time the Mughals were ruthless with their quarry. Having determined that Daud should be “relieved of the burden of his head,” Khan Jahan had the ex-king decapitated and his body fixed to a gibbet in Tanda; the head he sent to Akbar as a trophy. A smooth transition to imperial domination now seemed more certain than ever.
This was just the time, however, when a serious rebellion broke out within Akbar’s imperial service. A year before the conquest of Bengal, the emperor had required his manṣabdārs—the Mughal corps of military officials—to brand and present for imperial review the precise number of horses, with cavalrymen, that they were paid to maintain. He also centralized the empire’s fiscal basis by ordering that land revenues be placed under the direct control of the central government instead of at the disposal of the manṣabdārs. Such exertions of central authority naturally provoked resentment among many officials.
Worse, the emperor’s policy of shipping disaffected manṣabdārs to Bengal had the effect of concentrating potential rebels in a region distant from Delhi and legendary for its tradition of resisting central authority. In 1579, rebellion duly broke out. Led by Baba Khan Qaqshal and Ma‘sum Khan Kabuli, a manṣabdār who had come from Bihar to join the Bengal revolt, the rebels seized and plundered the official fortress in Tanda, executed Akbar’s hapless governor, and set up a “revolutionary government” amongst themselves. Hindu zamīndārs in both the southeastern and the southwestern delta swiftly threw off their allegiance to the Mughals, while other disaffected manṣabdārs in Bihar joined the movement in Bengal. For two years the delta passed completely beyond imperial authority, until 1582–83, when Akbar’s application of overwhelming force eventually quashed the revolt. Only one high-ranking Mughal officer would remain at large, the unrepentant Ma‘sum Khan Kabuli, who led a bitter fight against Mughal authority down to his death seventeen years later.
In 1583, when the turmoil within the imperial corps had subsided, the imperialists once again turned their attention to suppressing various indigenous resistance movements. These, however, were no longer concentrated in the northwest, the site of Muslim power since 1204, but in East Bengal generally, the vast region known to the Mughals as “Bhati.”
Anti-Mughal resistance now coalesced around a remarkable Bengali Muslim chieftain, ‘Isa Khan, whose seat of government lay deep within the delta’s eastern riverine tracts in the town of Katrabo near the ancient city of Sonargaon. In 1586 Ralph Fitch, a merchant then exploring the possibilities of opening up trade between England and India, traveled through Bengal’s eastern districts and wrote, “They be all hereabout Rebels against the King Zebaldin Echebar [Jalal al-Din Akbar]: for here are so many Rivers and Ilands, that they flee from one to another, whereby his Horsemen cannot prevaile against them. The chiefe King of all these Countries is called Isacan [‘Isa Khan], and he is chiefe of all the other Kings, and is a great friend to all Christians.” Fitch’s “other Kings” were the “twelve chieftains” (Beng., bāra bhūyān) recorded in other European accounts and celebrated in Bengali lore. In December 1600 the annual letter of the Jesuit Mission in Goa, commenting on the Mughal drive against Bengal’s former Afghan rulers, stated:
Twelve princes, however, called Boyones [bhūyān] who governed twelve provinces in the late King’s name, escaped from this massacre. These united against the Mongols [sic], and hitherto, thanks to their alliance, each maintains himself in his dominions. Very rich and disposing of strong forces, they bear themselves as Kings, chiefly he of Siripur [Sripur], also called Cadaray [Kedar Rai], and he of Chandecan [Raja Pratapaditya of Jessore], but most of all the Mansondolin [“Masnad-i ‘ālī,” title of ‘Isa Khan]. The Patanes [Afghans], being scattered above, are subject to the Boyones.
All twelve chieftains, now subordinate to ‘Isa Khan, had been former governors of the Bengal sultanate.
In September 1584, ‘Isa Khan delivered a crushing naval defeat to the Mughal governor, and for the next fifteen years, though always careful to accord Akbar his theoretical overlordship whenever it seemed prudent to do so, this “little king” ruled the eastern delta virtually unchecked. His prudence was dictated by the Mughals’ gradual mastery of the sort of naval tactics long used by chieftains of the eastern delta. In February 1586, in fact, imperial commanders pushed all the way through the jungle and riverine tracts to the port of Chittagong, on which occasion the city’s Arakanese ruler sent gifts of elephants to the Mughals. ‘Isa Khan also acted in a conciliatory manner. Yet strikes such as this were essentially raids; throughout this period the Mughals, forced to acknowledge ‘Isa Khan’s status as tributary “zamīndār of Bhati,” were quite unable to consolidate the east under anything like regular administration.
To remedy this situation, Akbar in early 1594 dispatched as governor of Bengal one of his most illustrious generals, the Rajput chieftain Raja Man Singh. After founding Rajmahal as his provincial capital in the delta’s northwestern corner, the new governor led a vast army into Bhati in late 1595.[40] Powerful Hindu chieftains like Kedar Rai, zamīndār of Bhusna in Faridpur District, and Patkunwar Narain, the cousin of the raja of Kuch Bihar, chose refuge with ‘Isa Khan rather than submit to the Mughals. In August 1597, ‘Isa Khan joined forces with Ma‘sum Khan Kabuli, the die-hard Mughal turncoat, and together they engaged Mughal naval forces with their own Bengali war boats in a battle that resulted in another Mughal defeat, in which Raja Man Singh’s own son was killed. But this was the high tide of ‘Isa Khan’s fortunes; two years later he died, apparently of natural causes. Sporadic resistance to Mughal authority nonetheless continued as ‘Isa Khan’s Afghan followers flocked to one of his sons, Daud, while Kedar Rai joined with bands of maritime Arakanese, known as Maghs, who had been plundering Bengali communities far up the Meghna estuary.
In 1602, with a view to thwarting the rebellious ambitions of all these elements, Raja Man Singh established Dhaka as the center of his military operations in the east. Soon it would be Bengal’s premier city. To be sure, the Mughals did not create the city ex nihilo . Since at least the mid fifteenth century, it had been an outpost of Muslim settlers, and one Mughal officer remarked that Dhaka, together with Gaur, Rajmahal, and Ghoraghat, had been among Bengal’s “ancient forts.” Hence it was probably for strategic reasons that, shortly after Mun‘im Khan took charge of the province in 1574, Dhaka was made the headquarters of a thāna (Beng., thānā), or military district, on the Mughals’ far eastern frontier. Yet imperial authority there was still precarious, for in 1584 Dhaka’s thānadār, or military administrator, had been captured and imprisoned by ‘Isa Khan.
By the time Raja Man Singh established himself in Dhaka, however, the balance of power had tipped in the Mughals’ favor. From his new headquarters the governor, exploiting the disarray that followed ‘Isa Khan’s death in 1599, mounted a vigorous campaign against the remaining “twelve chieftains.” First, he worked on the Afghans loyal to ‘Isa Khan’s son Daud, and then, in 1603, on Kedar Rai and the Arakanese. In all these campaigns the governor met with consummate success: he pushed back Daud to Sonargaon, defeated and killed Kedar Rai, expelled the Arakanese from the lower delta, and drove ‘Uthman Khan, the most powerful of the remaining Afghans, into the jungles of Mymensingh. But the governor would not remain in the city for long; in early 1605, he left for Agra to attend to the ailing emperor, whose death was approaching. In that same year, Akbar died and was succeeded by his son, Jahangir.
It was in Jahangir’s reign (1605–27) that the Mughal enterprise in Bengal passed from an ad hoc pursuit of rebels to the establishment of a regular administration. Initially, the new emperor’s efforts to subdue Afghan chieftains proved ineffectual, especially with respect to the redoubtable ‘Uthman Khan, who remained firmly entrenched in Bengal’s easternmost districts. But in May 1608, aiming to crush such elements once and for all, Jahangir appointed as governor ‘Ala al-Din Islam Khan, an extraordinarily able and determined commander.
A man about thirty-seven years of age at this time, Islam Khan enjoyed close ties with the emperor—the two had grown up together since childhood as foster-brothers—and possessed remarkable powers of self-discipline. Taking leave of the emperor, he moved down the Gangetic Plain at the head of an immense army of cavalry, artillery, and elephants, and a huge flotilla of war boats. After entering Bengal and pausing in Rajmahal, the army made its way through the jungles of the central delta, subdued rebellious chieftains on both sides of the Ganges-Padma river system, and finally reached Dhaka in 1610.
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The Consolidation of Mughal Authority, 1610–1704
With Islam Khan’s arrival, the Mughal era of Bengal’s history effectively began. Upon reaching the delta, the new governor first moved the imperial provincial capital from Rajmahal, in the far northwest, where all previous Muslim capitals had been located, to Dhaka, deep in the Bengal hinterland. In this way, regions that had hitherto remained beyond the reach of North Indian rulers, and had been only lightly touched by the sultans of Gaur, were directly exposed to the epicenter of Mughal culture and authority.
From 1610 to 1715, the Mughals would use Dhaka as a base for integrating diverse peoples into their social and bureaucratic system and for transforming into arable land the vast stretches of forest that still covered most of “Bhati,” or the eastern delta. Moreover, as Dhaka was connected to the Padma-Ganges river system at a point midway between the Bay of Bengal and older seats of Muslim power in the Gaur-Tanda region, the city would serve as an ideal entrepôt for riverine trade between East and West Bengal, between Bengal and Upper India, and between Bengal and the wider world beyond the bay. Since the overland ascendancy of Mughal influence in Bengal’s eastern hinterland occurred just as Portuguese, Dutch, and English commercial interests entered the region from overseas, this formerly isolated backwater was now simultaneously integrated into two cosmopolitan and expanding political economies, the Mughal and the European.
Islam Khan could not have foreseen the long-term implications of his planting the provincial capital in the heart of East Bengal. His immediate concern, after all, was to subdue refractory elements that had long eluded imperial authority. An iron-willed man, who demanded of his subordinates an unquestioning submission both to himself and to the Mughal cause, with which he fiercely identified,
Islam Khan governed only briefly, dying in office in 1613. Yet it was he who, in a bloody battle in the hills of Sylhet in 1612, defeated and killed ‘Uthman Khan, thereby extirpating the last credible remnant of Afghan resistance to Mughal power in the delta. And it was he, too, who established the political ties that would bind local potentates to the Mughal cause. Three factors helped the Mughals consolidate their power in the delta: their more effective use of military force, the diplomacy of Islam Khan, and the financial backing of Hindu merchant-bankers.
But how critical was the use of gunpowder in the Mughal conquest of Bengal? Mirza Nathan, a junior Mughal officer who accompanied numerous campaigns during the governorship of Islam Khan and his successors, remarked that “cannon, cross-bows, rockets and other fire-arms of this type…are the aggressive firearms of India.” This officer evidently associated gunpowder weapons with “India,” that is, Mughal Hindustan, as opposed to Bengal’s extreme northeastern frontier (in which context the remark was made), whose peoples lacked such firepower. These weapons included not only the type of heavy cannon that the Mughals brought with them to Bengal as early as Mun‘im Khan’s invasion of 1574, but smoothbore muskets and, by the early 1600s, lightweight cannon that could be transported on the shoulders of foot soldiers and fired by cannoneers from horseback.
Perhaps of greater significance for consolidating Mughal rule were Islam Khan’s adroit policies vis-à-vis the “twelve chieftains” and other locally entrenched zamīndārs. For in many engagements the actual use of guns, as opposed to their ostentatious display, was obviated by a diplomacy carefully calculated to win over local leaders. Typical was Islam Khan’s policy toward Raja Satrajit, the raja of Bhusna, located about twenty miles southwest of Faridpur on the border of modern Jessore. Mirza Nathan notes that the governor sent one of his generals to negotiate with this powerful chieftain, instructing him that “if luckily Satrajit submitted, then he should be given the hope of the grant of his territory as Jagir and should be brought before Islam Khan in accordance with this covenant; otherwise he should have only himself to thank for the consequences of his acts, and his country should be left as a prey to the horse of the imperial Karoris (revenue-collectors).”
In general, the more important the chieftain, and the sooner he capitulated, the more inducements Islam Khan was prepared to offer in exchange for submission to Mughal rule. This is well illustrated in the governor’s dealings with Raja Pratapaditya of Jessore, one of the most powerful of Bengal’s “twelve chieftains.” “Islam Khan,” wrote Mirza Nathan, “for the sake of drawing the attention of other Zamindars, and also in consideration of the high position held by the aforesaid Raja among the Zamindars of Bengal, bestowed honours upon him beyond measure, and consoled and encouraged him.”
Aware that lesser chiefs were looking to bigger chiefs such as Pratapaditya for leadership, or at least for direction, the governor promised this chieftain not only his own former possessions as jāgīr but other lands far to the east. To seal the covenant, the governor conferred on him a stunning array of Mughal regalia: a sword, a bejeweled swordbelt, a camphor-stand, five high-bred horses, three elephants, and an imperial kettledrum.
On the other hand, the Mughal regime tolerated no sign of perfidy on the part of a newly created jāgīrdār. Despite his formal submission, Pratapaditya failed to provide Islam Khan with his armies as promised, and to punish him, the governor sent a substantial army and navy into Jessore. After defeating Pratapaditya’s forces, the governor imprisoned the raja and annexed his territories. The province’s chief fiscal officer was then sent to the raja’s former domains in order “to make due assessment of revenue of Jessore and to bring the rent-roll (nuskha) to the government record-office” in Dhaka. Clearly, by resisting imperial rule the raja forfeited his chance of keeping his former domains as jāgīr, while the fields of his former subjects were reassessed by Mughal revenue officers. Had Pratapaditya not resisted, he would have continued levying and collecting taxes through his own agents.
An even bigger prize was the submission of Musa Khan, a son of ‘Isa Khan. Known by the regal title of Masnad-i ‘ālī , “Exalted Throne,” Musa Khan had inherited his father’s position as the principal ruler of Bhati. Although the Bengali ruler possessed a huge fleet of 700 war boats, many of them armed with cannon, the Mughals met him with their own fleet of 295 war boats, manned by twelve thousand sailors, and compelled him to submit. When Musa Khan rebelled and was again forced to submit, the governor placed him under detention in Dhaka.
In 1613, however, when Qasim Khan succeeded to the governorship, the Bengali chieftain was granted his freedom and allowed to participate in major expeditions along the northern and eastern frontiers. Against the raja of Tippera, in fact, he was entrusted with the co-command of an army of five thousand musketeers and fifty elephants, and participated in the capture of the raja, personally bringing the captive king to Dhaka. By the time of Ibrahim Khan’s governorship (1617–24), Mirza Nathan spoke of “Musa Khan and the Twelve Bhuyans of Bhati” being engaged in Mughal expeditions throughout eastern Bengal, indicating that by this time all the formerly independent chieftains had become integrated into imperial service.
At the center of all this political activity was Dhaka, or “Jahangirnagar,” as it was officially known, which in the seventeenth century attained a peak of power and influence. Fray Sebastião Manrique, who was there in 1640, described the place as a “Gangetic emporium,” with a population of over two hundred thousand. Recalling that the population of Gaur had been estimated at only forty thousand at the height of the sultanate’s power around 1515, one sees how rapidly the Mughal capital must have grown in the thirty years since Islam Khan’s arrival. Manrique was especially impressed with the city’s wealth. “Many strange nations,” he wrote,
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The Rise of Mughal Power in Bengal
The country of Bengal is a land where, owing to the climate’s favouring the base, the dust of dissension is always rising.
In the late sixteenth century, a dynasty of Chaghatai Turks commonly known as the Mughals annexed Bengal to their vast Indian empire, thereby ending the delta’s long isolation from North India. As just one among twelve provinces, Bengal was now administered by a class of imperial officials who, regularly rotated through the realm, shared a larger, pan-Indian view of their political mission. Unlike the later rulers of the sultanate, the new ruling class lacked attachments to Bengal and its culture. This served to widen the gulf between ashrāf Muslims, identified with the new wave of outsiders who swept into the delta after the conquest, and non-ashrāf Muslims, increasingly identified as native Bengali Muslims. Economically, the advent of Mughal rule greatly stimulated the production of manufactured goods in Bengal, especially of exports to the imperial court in North India. The conquest also furthered the exploitation and settlement of Bengal’s forested hinterlands, a process that greatly altered the delta’s social landscape. All of these forces, and especially the last, were to have enduring significance for the evolution of Islam and Muslim society in Bengal.
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The Afghan Age in Bengal, 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.
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. 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.
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). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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.” 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.” 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. 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.”
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The Early Mughal Experience in Bengal, 1574–1610
But seizing the capital and possessing the land were two different matters. While Mun‘im Khan and Raja Todar Mal, Akbar’s finance minister, were in Tanda reorganizing the revenue administration of the newly conquered province, thousands of Afghans melted into the forested Bengali hinterland, where for the next forty years they continued to hold out against the new regime. There they attracted a host of dissidents, including Muslim and Hindu zamīndārs, Portuguese renegades, and tribal chieftains, all of whom perceived the Chaghatai Turks from Upper India as foreigners and usurpers.
From Abu’l-fazl’s imperial perspective, however, the years after 1574 were devoted to clearing the delta of “the weeds and rubbish of opposition” khas-o-khāshāk-i mukhālif). Having seized Tanda, the Mughal victors pursued the Afghans in four directions: north to Ghoraghat, south to Satgaon, east to Sonargaon, and southeast into Fatehabad (present-day Faridpur town). These initial campaigns witnessed several pitched battles of great scope and bloodshed, in particular the battle of Tukaroi in southern Midnapur District (March 3, 1575), in which Todar Mal and Mun‘im Khan achieved a stunning victory over Sultan Daud Khan.
On this occasion the Mughals resorted to terror tactics, filling eight lofty minarets with the skulls of their slain enemies “as a warning to spectators.” Actually, though, the use of such violence was exceptional. With their cavalry bogged down in unfamiliar jungle terrain and their troops close to deserting from lack of interest in fighting so far from home, the Mughals relied more on bribery, cajolery, diplomacy, impressive displays of military power, and sowing the seeds of dissension within enemy ranks than upon the application of brute force.
Such a policy was not only expedient. It also accorded with Akbar’s theory of imperial sovereignty, which, as in traditional Indian political thought, aimed not at annihilating adversaries but at humbling them into recognizing the single, overarching sovereignty of the victorious monarch. Hence on April 12, 1575, there was great celebration in the Mughal camp when Sultan Daud Khan, finally perceiving the futility of continued resistance, appeared before Mun‘im Khan and partook of a formal “banquet of reconciliation.” Here was a political rite, a ritual of incorporation, in which symbolism was everything.
Displaying warm affection, the Mughal general advanced to the edge of the carpet laid out in a ceremonial tent specially arranged for the occasion. There he greeted the defeated king. Daud ungirded his sword and set it aside. Mun‘im Khan then presented the Afghan with a Mughal sword, an embroidered belt, and a cloak. Whether or not the cloak had actually been worn by Akbar, by donning it Daud Khan became ritually “incorporated” into the body of the emperor—a political rite the Bengali ruler would well have understood, since his predecessors on the throne of Gaur had followed the same practice. Adorned with Mughal regalia, Daud then turned his face in the direction of Akbar’s capital in Fatehpur Sikri and solemnly prostrated himself. His independence formally ended, Daud and his kingdom were now bound to the emperor.
Several events, however, prevented the new province’s smooth integration into the Mughal domain. Soon after returning to northern Bengal from Tukaroi, Mun‘im Khan transferred the seat of government from Tanda, capital of Bengal since the time of Sulaiman Karrani (1565), back to the ancient city of Gaur. The decision proved catastrophic, for a shift in the main course of the Ganges River had turned the river’s formerly swift channels into stagnant backwaters, making them breeding grounds for easily communicable diseases. As a result, in the months after April 1575 a devastating plague carried away thousands of Mughal officers and soldiers, not to mention untold thousands of civilians.
“The thought of death took hold of everyone,” wrote Abu’l-fazl, as the plague’s devastation swiftly cut into the morale of officers and troops. Many of these became altogether disgusted with Bengal and began thinking only of gathering their belongings and leaving. We have no figures on how many died during the plague of 1575, or how many left the country. But coming as it did at the very dawn of the Mughal encounter with Bengal, a critical moment in the formation of Mughal perceptions of the delta, this catastrophe surely contributed to the stereotype, soon accepted throughout the imperial service, that Bengal was a hostile and foreign land.
It was in this melancholy atmosphere, in October 1575, that Mun‘im Khan died. The infighting among Mughal officers that followed the governor’s death encouraged Daud Khan, the last independent sultan of Bengal, to reconsider his submission to Akbar and regroup his scattered Afghan forces for a second try at dislodging the Mughals from the delta. In these circumstances, Akbar appointed another decorated Mughal commander, Khan Jahan, to take charge of the newly won province.
Accompanied by the veteran Raja Todar Mal, the new governor reached the restored capital of Tanda in November, and in the following July met Daud’s forces along the banks of the Padma River in central Bengal. Again the Afghans suffered a crushing military reversal. Their finest field commander was killed in action, and Daud himself, his horse stuck in the monsoon’s muddy quagmire, was taken alive.
This time the Mughals were ruthless with their quarry. Having determined that Daud should be “relieved of the burden of his head,” Khan Jahan had the ex-king decapitated and his body fixed to a gibbet in Tanda; the head he sent to Akbar as a trophy. A smooth transition to imperial domination now seemed more certain than ever.
This was just the time, however, when a serious rebellion broke out within Akbar’s imperial service. A year before the conquest of Bengal, the emperor had required his manṣabdārs—the Mughal corps of military officials—to brand and present for imperial review the precise number of horses, with cavalrymen, that they were paid to maintain. He also centralized the empire’s fiscal basis by ordering that land revenues be placed under the direct control of the central government instead of at the disposal of the manṣabdārs. Such exertions of central authority naturally provoked resentment among many officials.
Worse, the emperor’s policy of shipping disaffected manṣabdārs to Bengal had the effect of concentrating potential rebels in a region distant from Delhi and legendary for its tradition of resisting central authority. In 1579, rebellion duly broke out. Led by Baba Khan Qaqshal and Ma‘sum Khan Kabuli, a manṣabdār who had come from Bihar to join the Bengal revolt, the rebels seized and plundered the official fortress in Tanda, executed Akbar’s hapless governor, and set up a “revolutionary government” amongst themselves. Hindu zamīndārs in both the southeastern and the southwestern delta swiftly threw off their allegiance to the Mughals, while other disaffected manṣabdārs in Bihar joined the movement in Bengal. For two years the delta passed completely beyond imperial authority, until 1582–83, when Akbar’s application of overwhelming force eventually quashed the revolt. Only one high-ranking Mughal officer would remain at large, the unrepentant Ma‘sum Khan Kabuli, who led a bitter fight against Mughal authority down to his death seventeen years later.
In 1583, when the turmoil within the imperial corps had subsided, the imperialists once again turned their attention to suppressing various indigenous resistance movements. These, however, were no longer concentrated in the northwest, the site of Muslim power since 1204, but in East Bengal generally, the vast region known to the Mughals as “Bhati.”
Anti-Mughal resistance now coalesced around a remarkable Bengali Muslim chieftain, ‘Isa Khan, whose seat of government lay deep within the delta’s eastern riverine tracts in the town of Katrabo near the ancient city of Sonargaon. In 1586 Ralph Fitch, a merchant then exploring the possibilities of opening up trade between England and India, traveled through Bengal’s eastern districts and wrote, “They be all hereabout Rebels against the King Zebaldin Echebar [Jalal al-Din Akbar]: for here are so many Rivers and Ilands, that they flee from one to another, whereby his Horsemen cannot prevaile against them. The chiefe King of all these Countries is called Isacan [‘Isa Khan], and he is chiefe of all the other Kings, and is a great friend to all Christians.” Fitch’s “other Kings” were the “twelve chieftains” (Beng., bāra bhūyān) recorded in other European accounts and celebrated in Bengali lore. In December 1600 the annual letter of the Jesuit Mission in Goa, commenting on the Mughal drive against Bengal’s former Afghan rulers, stated:
Twelve princes, however, called Boyones [bhūyān] who governed twelve provinces in the late King’s name, escaped from this massacre. These united against the Mongols [sic], and hitherto, thanks to their alliance, each maintains himself in his dominions. Very rich and disposing of strong forces, they bear themselves as Kings, chiefly he of Siripur [Sripur], also called Cadaray [Kedar Rai], and he of Chandecan [Raja Pratapaditya of Jessore], but most of all the Mansondolin [“Masnad-i ‘ālī,” title of ‘Isa Khan]. The Patanes [Afghans], being scattered above, are subject to the Boyones.
All twelve chieftains, now subordinate to ‘Isa Khan, had been former governors of the Bengal sultanate.
In September 1584, ‘Isa Khan delivered a crushing naval defeat to the Mughal governor, and for the next fifteen years, though always careful to accord Akbar his theoretical overlordship whenever it seemed prudent to do so, this “little king” ruled the eastern delta virtually unchecked. His prudence was dictated by the Mughals’ gradual mastery of the sort of naval tactics long used by chieftains of the eastern delta. In February 1586, in fact, imperial commanders pushed all the way through the jungle and riverine tracts to the port of Chittagong, on which occasion the city’s Arakanese ruler sent gifts of elephants to the Mughals. ‘Isa Khan also acted in a conciliatory manner. Yet strikes such as this were essentially raids; throughout this period the Mughals, forced to acknowledge ‘Isa Khan’s status as tributary “zamīndār of Bhati,” were quite unable to consolidate the east under anything like regular administration.
To remedy this situation, Akbar in early 1594 dispatched as governor of Bengal one of his most illustrious generals, the Rajput chieftain Raja Man Singh. After founding Rajmahal as his provincial capital in the delta’s northwestern corner, the new governor led a vast army into Bhati in late 1595.[40] Powerful Hindu chieftains like Kedar Rai, zamīndār of Bhusna in Faridpur District, and Patkunwar Narain, the cousin of the raja of Kuch Bihar, chose refuge with ‘Isa Khan rather than submit to the Mughals. In August 1597, ‘Isa Khan joined forces with Ma‘sum Khan Kabuli, the die-hard Mughal turncoat, and together they engaged Mughal naval forces with their own Bengali war boats in a battle that resulted in another Mughal defeat, in which Raja Man Singh’s own son was killed. But this was the high tide of ‘Isa Khan’s fortunes; two years later he died, apparently of natural causes. Sporadic resistance to Mughal authority nonetheless continued as ‘Isa Khan’s Afghan followers flocked to one of his sons, Daud, while Kedar Rai joined with bands of maritime Arakanese, known as Maghs, who had been plundering Bengali communities far up the Meghna estuary.
In 1602, with a view to thwarting the rebellious ambitions of all these elements, Raja Man Singh established Dhaka as the center of his military operations in the east. Soon it would be Bengal’s premier city. To be sure, the Mughals did not create the city ex nihilo . Since at least the mid fifteenth century, it had been an outpost of Muslim settlers, and one Mughal officer remarked that Dhaka, together with Gaur, Rajmahal, and Ghoraghat, had been among Bengal’s “ancient forts.” Hence it was probably for strategic reasons that, shortly after Mun‘im Khan took charge of the province in 1574, Dhaka was made the headquarters of a thāna (Beng., thānā), or military district, on the Mughals’ far eastern frontier. Yet imperial authority there was still precarious, for in 1584 Dhaka’s thānadār, or military administrator, had been captured and imprisoned by ‘Isa Khan.
By the time Raja Man Singh established himself in Dhaka, however, the balance of power had tipped in the Mughals’ favor. From his new headquarters the governor, exploiting the disarray that followed ‘Isa Khan’s death in 1599, mounted a vigorous campaign against the remaining “twelve chieftains.” First, he worked on the Afghans loyal to ‘Isa Khan’s son Daud, and then, in 1603, on Kedar Rai and the Arakanese. In all these campaigns the governor met with consummate success: he pushed back Daud to Sonargaon, defeated and killed Kedar Rai, expelled the Arakanese from the lower delta, and drove ‘Uthman Khan, the most powerful of the remaining Afghans, into the jungles of Mymensingh. But the governor would not remain in the city for long; in early 1605, he left for Agra to attend to the ailing emperor, whose death was approaching. In that same year, Akbar died and was succeeded by his son, Jahangir.
It was in Jahangir’s reign (1605–27) that the Mughal enterprise in Bengal passed from an ad hoc pursuit of rebels to the establishment of a regular administration. Initially, the new emperor’s efforts to subdue Afghan chieftains proved ineffectual, especially with respect to the redoubtable ‘Uthman Khan, who remained firmly entrenched in Bengal’s easternmost districts. But in May 1608, aiming to crush such elements once and for all, Jahangir appointed as governor ‘Ala al-Din Islam Khan, an extraordinarily able and determined commander.
A man about thirty-seven years of age at this time, Islam Khan enjoyed close ties with the emperor—the two had grown up together since childhood as foster-brothers—and possessed remarkable powers of self-discipline. Taking leave of the emperor, he moved down the Gangetic Plain at the head of an immense army of cavalry, artillery, and elephants, and a huge flotilla of war boats. After entering Bengal and pausing in Rajmahal, the army made its way through the jungles of the central delta, subdued rebellious chieftains on both sides of the Ganges-Padma river system, and finally reached Dhaka in 1610.
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The Consolidation of Mughal Authority, 1610–1704
With Islam Khan’s arrival, the Mughal era of Bengal’s history effectively began. Upon reaching the delta, the new governor first moved the imperial provincial capital from Rajmahal, in the far northwest, where all previous Muslim capitals had been located, to Dhaka, deep in the Bengal hinterland. In this way, regions that had hitherto remained beyond the reach of North Indian rulers, and had been only lightly touched by the sultans of Gaur, were directly exposed to the epicenter of Mughal culture and authority.
From 1610 to 1715, the Mughals would use Dhaka as a base for integrating diverse peoples into their social and bureaucratic system and for transforming into arable land the vast stretches of forest that still covered most of “Bhati,” or the eastern delta. Moreover, as Dhaka was connected to the Padma-Ganges river system at a point midway between the Bay of Bengal and older seats of Muslim power in the Gaur-Tanda region, the city would serve as an ideal entrepôt for riverine trade between East and West Bengal, between Bengal and Upper India, and between Bengal and the wider world beyond the bay. Since the overland ascendancy of Mughal influence in Bengal’s eastern hinterland occurred just as Portuguese, Dutch, and English commercial interests entered the region from overseas, this formerly isolated backwater was now simultaneously integrated into two cosmopolitan and expanding political economies, the Mughal and the European.
Islam Khan could not have foreseen the long-term implications of his planting the provincial capital in the heart of East Bengal. His immediate concern, after all, was to subdue refractory elements that had long eluded imperial authority. An iron-willed man, who demanded of his subordinates an unquestioning submission both to himself and to the Mughal cause, with which he fiercely identified,
Islam Khan governed only briefly, dying in office in 1613. Yet it was he who, in a bloody battle in the hills of Sylhet in 1612, defeated and killed ‘Uthman Khan, thereby extirpating the last credible remnant of Afghan resistance to Mughal power in the delta. And it was he, too, who established the political ties that would bind local potentates to the Mughal cause. Three factors helped the Mughals consolidate their power in the delta: their more effective use of military force, the diplomacy of Islam Khan, and the financial backing of Hindu merchant-bankers.
But how critical was the use of gunpowder in the Mughal conquest of Bengal? Mirza Nathan, a junior Mughal officer who accompanied numerous campaigns during the governorship of Islam Khan and his successors, remarked that “cannon, cross-bows, rockets and other fire-arms of this type…are the aggressive firearms of India.” This officer evidently associated gunpowder weapons with “India,” that is, Mughal Hindustan, as opposed to Bengal’s extreme northeastern frontier (in which context the remark was made), whose peoples lacked such firepower. These weapons included not only the type of heavy cannon that the Mughals brought with them to Bengal as early as Mun‘im Khan’s invasion of 1574, but smoothbore muskets and, by the early 1600s, lightweight cannon that could be transported on the shoulders of foot soldiers and fired by cannoneers from horseback.
Perhaps of greater significance for consolidating Mughal rule were Islam Khan’s adroit policies vis-à-vis the “twelve chieftains” and other locally entrenched zamīndārs. For in many engagements the actual use of guns, as opposed to their ostentatious display, was obviated by a diplomacy carefully calculated to win over local leaders. Typical was Islam Khan’s policy toward Raja Satrajit, the raja of Bhusna, located about twenty miles southwest of Faridpur on the border of modern Jessore. Mirza Nathan notes that the governor sent one of his generals to negotiate with this powerful chieftain, instructing him that “if luckily Satrajit submitted, then he should be given the hope of the grant of his territory as Jagir and should be brought before Islam Khan in accordance with this covenant; otherwise he should have only himself to thank for the consequences of his acts, and his country should be left as a prey to the horse of the imperial Karoris (revenue-collectors).”
In general, the more important the chieftain, and the sooner he capitulated, the more inducements Islam Khan was prepared to offer in exchange for submission to Mughal rule. This is well illustrated in the governor’s dealings with Raja Pratapaditya of Jessore, one of the most powerful of Bengal’s “twelve chieftains.” “Islam Khan,” wrote Mirza Nathan, “for the sake of drawing the attention of other Zamindars, and also in consideration of the high position held by the aforesaid Raja among the Zamindars of Bengal, bestowed honours upon him beyond measure, and consoled and encouraged him.”
Aware that lesser chiefs were looking to bigger chiefs such as Pratapaditya for leadership, or at least for direction, the governor promised this chieftain not only his own former possessions as jāgīr but other lands far to the east. To seal the covenant, the governor conferred on him a stunning array of Mughal regalia: a sword, a bejeweled swordbelt, a camphor-stand, five high-bred horses, three elephants, and an imperial kettledrum.
On the other hand, the Mughal regime tolerated no sign of perfidy on the part of a newly created jāgīrdār. Despite his formal submission, Pratapaditya failed to provide Islam Khan with his armies as promised, and to punish him, the governor sent a substantial army and navy into Jessore. After defeating Pratapaditya’s forces, the governor imprisoned the raja and annexed his territories. The province’s chief fiscal officer was then sent to the raja’s former domains in order “to make due assessment of revenue of Jessore and to bring the rent-roll (nuskha) to the government record-office” in Dhaka. Clearly, by resisting imperial rule the raja forfeited his chance of keeping his former domains as jāgīr, while the fields of his former subjects were reassessed by Mughal revenue officers. Had Pratapaditya not resisted, he would have continued levying and collecting taxes through his own agents.
An even bigger prize was the submission of Musa Khan, a son of ‘Isa Khan. Known by the regal title of Masnad-i ‘ālī , “Exalted Throne,” Musa Khan had inherited his father’s position as the principal ruler of Bhati. Although the Bengali ruler possessed a huge fleet of 700 war boats, many of them armed with cannon, the Mughals met him with their own fleet of 295 war boats, manned by twelve thousand sailors, and compelled him to submit. When Musa Khan rebelled and was again forced to submit, the governor placed him under detention in Dhaka.
In 1613, however, when Qasim Khan succeeded to the governorship, the Bengali chieftain was granted his freedom and allowed to participate in major expeditions along the northern and eastern frontiers. Against the raja of Tippera, in fact, he was entrusted with the co-command of an army of five thousand musketeers and fifty elephants, and participated in the capture of the raja, personally bringing the captive king to Dhaka. By the time of Ibrahim Khan’s governorship (1617–24), Mirza Nathan spoke of “Musa Khan and the Twelve Bhuyans of Bhati” being engaged in Mughal expeditions throughout eastern Bengal, indicating that by this time all the formerly independent chieftains had become integrated into imperial service.
At the center of all this political activity was Dhaka, or “Jahangirnagar,” as it was officially known, which in the seventeenth century attained a peak of power and influence. Fray Sebastião Manrique, who was there in 1640, described the place as a “Gangetic emporium,” with a population of over two hundred thousand. Recalling that the population of Gaur had been estimated at only forty thousand at the height of the sultanate’s power around 1515, one sees how rapidly the Mughal capital must have grown in the thirty years since Islam Khan’s arrival. Manrique was especially impressed with the city’s wealth. “Many strange nations,” he wrote,
resort to this city on account of its vast trade and commerce in a great variety of commodities, which are produced in profusion in the rich and fertile lands of this region. These have raised the city to an eminence of wealth which is actually stupefying, especially when one sees and considers the large quantities of money which lie principally in the houses of the Cataris [Khatri], in such quantities indeed that, being difficult to count, it is usual commonly to be weighed.
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Summary
Soon after Islam Khan’s arrival in Bengal, the Mughals succeeded in annihilating or winning over all the major chiefs entrenched in the countryside since the time of the sultans. Yet it is fair to ask how far the new rulers were able to extend their political reach beneath the level of important chieftains, or zamīndārs, after these had submitted to imperial rule.
In sum, by the mid seventeenth century, as both foreign observers and contemporary revenue documents attest, the Mughals had established both power and credibility throughout the delta. They achieved this by means of a military machine that effectively combined gunpowder weaponry with mounted archers and naval forces, a determined diplomacy that rewarded loyalty while punishing perfidy, and the financial services of mobile and wealthy Marwari bankers. Both militarily and diplomatically, success begat success.
Bengali chieftains who witnessed these successes increasingly understood that the advantages of joining the new order outweighed those of resisting it. Above all, the advent of the Mughal age, unlike previous changes of the guard at Gaur, did not represent a mere military occupation in which one ruling class simply replaced another. Nor were the changes accompanying Mughal rule merely ones of scale—that is, bigger cannons, a more dazzling court, or taller monuments. Rather, as will be seen in the following chapters, the conquest was accompanied by fundamental changes in the region’s economic structure, its sociopolitical system, and its cultural complexion, both at court and in the countryside.
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Summary
Soon after Islam Khan’s arrival in Bengal, the Mughals succeeded in annihilating or winning over all the major chiefs entrenched in the countryside since the time of the sultans. Yet it is fair to ask how far the new rulers were able to extend their political reach beneath the level of important chieftains, or zamīndārs, after these had submitted to imperial rule.
In sum, by the mid seventeenth century, as both foreign observers and contemporary revenue documents attest, the Mughals had established both power and credibility throughout the delta. They achieved this by means of a military machine that effectively combined gunpowder weaponry with mounted archers and naval forces, a determined diplomacy that rewarded loyalty while punishing perfidy, and the financial services of mobile and wealthy Marwari bankers. Both militarily and diplomatically, success begat success.
Bengali chieftains who witnessed these successes increasingly understood that the advantages of joining the new order outweighed those of resisting it. Above all, the advent of the Mughal age, unlike previous changes of the guard at Gaur, did not represent a mere military occupation in which one ruling class simply replaced another. Nor were the changes accompanying Mughal rule merely ones of scale—that is, bigger cannons, a more dazzling court, or taller monuments. Rather, as will be seen in the following chapters, the conquest was accompanied by fundamental changes in the region’s economic structure, its sociopolitical system, and its cultural complexion, both at court and in the countryside.
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