Medieval Bihar: Sher Shah Suri, His Reforms and After

Medieval Bihar is a short chapter with one very large figure in it. For three centuries the province was a corridor fought over by Delhi and Bengal, and then a jagirdar's son from Sasaram took the throne of Delhi, ruled for five years, and left behind a system of roads, coins and land revenue that the Mughals adopted almost unchanged. BPSC, Bihar Police and BSSC papers ask this chapter as battles, reforms and buildings, and almost every question touches Sher Shah Suri.

Bihar before the Suris

The province took its name from the word vihara, the Buddhist monastery, and it was the monasteries that suffered first. Around the beginning of the thirteenth century Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khilji, a commander of Qutbuddin Aibak, overran Bihar and destroyed the monastic universities of Odantapuri and Nalanda, breaking the old centres of learning. Under the Delhi Sultanate Bihar was governed from Bihar Sharif and changed hands repeatedly between Delhi and the Sultans of Bengal. In the early sixteenth century south Bihar was held by the Lohani Afghans under Bahar Khan Lohani, who took the title Sultan Muhammad, while the Nuhani and later the Karrani Afghans of Bengal pressed from the east; Babur's victory on the Ghaghra in 1529 brought the Mughals to the edge of the province.

The rise of Sher Shah Suri

Sher Shah was born Farid Khan, the son of Hasan Khan, an Afghan of the Sur clan who held the jagir of Sasaram in what is now Rohtas district. Quarrels at home sent him to Jaunpur, where he read Persian and learnt administration, and he first managed his father's jagir with an eye for the peasant and the revenue record. In the service of Bahar Khan Lohani of south Bihar he killed a tiger single handed and earned the title Sher Khan. He served Babur for a short while, learnt the Mughal way of war from the inside, and then built his own power in Bihar, taking the hill fort of Rohtasgarh by a stratagem from its raja and using Chunar as his base. On 26 June 1539 he defeated Humayun at the battle of Chausa, in present Buxar district, and on 17 May 1540 he defeated him again at Kannauj, also called Bilgram, driving him out of India altogether. He then took the throne of Delhi as Sher Shah and ruled until 1545.

The administration of Sher Shah

His reforms are the heart of the chapter.

The army was paid in cash and recruited directly, with the soldier's descriptive roll kept on record, and the emperor moved constantly through his territory. His buildings are asked about as often as his reforms: the Purana Qila at Delhi with its Qila i Kuhna mosque and the Sher Mandal, in which Humayun later died; the strengthening of Rohtasgarh; the rebuilding of Patna on the Ganga as the provincial headquarters in place of Bihar Sharif; and above all his own tomb at Sasaram, raised on a platform in the middle of a tank, the work of the architect Aliwal Khan. Sher Shah died on 22 May 1545 of a gunpowder explosion during the siege of Kalinjar. His reign is described in the Tarikh i Sher Shahi of Abbas Khan Sarwani, and it was in 1540, in his time, that Malik Muhammad Jayasi completed the Awadhi poem Padmavat.

After Sher Shah

His son Islam Shah, earlier Jalal Khan, ruled from 1545 to 1554 and moved his capital to Gwalior, but the family fell into civil war after him. Muhammad Adil Shah's Hindu general Hemu, called Hem Chandra Vikramaditya, took Delhi and Agra in 1556 and was defeated and killed at the Second Battle of Panipat on 5 November 1556 by Akbar's army under Bairam Khan, which ended Afghan rule in the north. In Bengal and Bihar the Karrani Afghans held on until Akbar's commanders took Patna from Daud Khan Karrani in 1574; the battles of Tukaroi in 1575 and Rajmahal in 1576 finished them, and Bihar became a suba of the Mughal empire, divided into sarkars and parganas and governed from Patna. Under the later Mughals Prince Azim ush Shan, a grandson of Aurangzeb, served as subahdar and renamed Patna Azimabad in 1704, a name the old city still carries in its records. The tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, was born at Patna in 1666, and the Takht Harimandir Sahib at Patna Sahib marks the place.

The close of the period

The last act of medieval Bihar was fought at Buxar on 22 October 1764, where Hector Munro defeated the combined armies of Mir Qasim, the deposed Nawab of Bengal, Shuja ud Daula, the Nawab of Awadh, and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. The Treaty of Allahabad of 1765 followed, and with the grant of the diwani, the right to collect revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, the East India Company became the real master of the province. From there the story of Bihar passes into the colonial period, to the revolt of 1857 and Veer Kunwar Singh.