Sher Shah Suri's tomb at Sasaram, Bihar

At a glance

• The tomb of Sher Shah Suri (شېر شاه سوري, d. May 1545) stands in the middle of an artificial lake at Sasaram in Bihar, on the lands his father Hasan Khan Sur held as a jagir from the Lodi sultans. [1, 5]

• It is an octagonal three-storey building under one broad dome, raised on a square stone terrace. The district administration of Rohtas gives its height as 122 feet and the span of the dome as 22 metres. [7]

• Work began in Sher Shah's lifetime and ended under his son Islam Shah. An inscription dates its completion to 16 August 1545, about three months after his death. [7]

• Local tradition and the district page name Mir Muhammad Aliwal Khan as the builder. Percy Brown, writing on Indian architecture, calls him a master-builder trained in the imperial tradition and says he built Hasan Khan's tomb first, about 1535. [5–7]

• Brown treats the tomb as the last and finest form of the octagonal tomb that the Sayyid and Lodi sultans had built at Delhi. [6]

• It is a protected monument. In December 2025 the National Monuments Authority made bye-laws for building around it. [8]

A jagir at Sasaram

Sher Shah's family were Afghans of the Sur clan from the Gomal country, and came to India in Sultan Bahlul Lodi's reign. His story is told in Sher Shah Suri: the Afghan who drove the Mughals out of Delhi. Here it matters for one fact. Under Sultan Sikandar Lodi, Jamal Khan, governor of Jaunpur, gave Hasan Khan the parganas of Sasaram, Hajipur and Tanda, near Benares, to keep 500 horsemen. [1]

Abbas Khan Sarwani, the Afghan who wrote the Tarikh-i Sher Shahi under Akbar, tells the rest. When Hasan Khan died, Farid, the future Sher Shah, obtained a grant of the two family parganas from Sultan Ibrahim Lodi through his patron Daulat Khan, and rode to his jagir at Sasaram to take possession. [1] Abbas was an Afghan of the Sarwani, connected by marriage to Sher Shah's family, who held a command of 500 horse under Akbar and wrote, probably soon after 1579, from what he had heard from those who knew the king. [1] He does not describe the tomb. He records only that Sher Shah died on 10 Rabi al-awwal 952, in May 1545, and that the date was found in the words az atash murd, "he died from fire". [1]

The tomb stands in the town where Sher Shah's career began. The Bengal District Gazetteer for Shahabad, compiled by L. S. S. O'Malley in 1906, says he was buried at Sasaram "in the magnificent mausoleum which he had built for himself". [5]

Hasan Khan's tomb

The first building was Hasan Khan's. It stands inside the town in a walled courtyard with towers at the four corners and a gate on the east. O'Malley describes an octagonal hall under a large dome, with an arcade of three pointed arches on each side. Each side of the arcade carries three small domes. Above is a terrace with a kiosk at each angle. The walls were once covered with glazed pottery and stucco and carried verses of the Quran. [5]

Brown dates it to about 1535 and calls it a copy of a Lodi octagonal tomb. He finds it less accomplished than the Delhi tombs: it has no plinth, so it stands level with the ground and loses height, and its middle storey is a bare wall. He suggests it was partly an experiment. [6] Abbas places Hasan Khan's death in the reign of Ibrahim Lodi, before 1526, so the building was raised some years after the man it covers. [1]

The tomb in the lake

Buchanan found the tomb on the west side of Sasaram, in the middle of a tank cut for it. O'Malley puts Hasan Khan's tomb east of it. [4, 5] The measurements of the lake differ with who took them.

• The district page of Rohtas gives the lake as about 22 acres, 1,130 feet east to west and 865 feet north to south. [7]

• Francis Buchanan, who surveyed the Shahabad district in 1812 and 1813, measured 1,144 feet by 898 from the head of the steps on 5 January 1813. [4]

• Brown gives each side as 1,400 feet. O'Malley says about 1,000 feet square. [5, 6]

The earth dug out of the tank was thrown up in banks around it. [4] Inside the water a stepped stone base rises to a square terrace. Buchanan put the terrace 30 feet above the water. The tomb stands on it, an octagon with three arched openings on each face and a verandah round it. [4] Above the verandah the walls step back twice, each stage carrying small domed kiosks on the corners, and over them rises the dome, finished with a lotus finial. [6]

O'Malley gives its dome a span of 72 feet and notes that this is some 13 feet wider than the dome of the Taj Mahal. [5] Brown says the tomb is 150 feet high, with no inner dome: the hall is a single space 66 feet across and 90 feet from floor to crown. [6] The interior has no more than carved inscriptions on the wall facing Mecca, and the walls climb in rows of 8, 16 and 32 arches to carry the dome. [6] Seven sides have doors and the western side has the prayer niche. [4, 6]

Sher Shah's grave is in the middle of the hall, with a short pillar at its head. At its foot lie two rows of other graves, said to be those of his favourite officers. [4, 5]

The turn of the upper building

The tomb does not sit square on its terrace. O'Malley notes that the building is placed obliquely to the base "for some unknown reason". [5] Buchanan, who measured it, said he could assign no reason, and thought for a while that the turn was meant to bring the prayer wall to face Mecca. [4] Brown gives another account: the builders found that the stepped base was eight degrees out of line with the compass, and since the true line of the qibla mattered, they built the upper tomb at an angle to its base. [6]

Colour

Hodges and Brown both saw a grey building, and the district page calls the stone red sandstone. [3, 6, 7] Brown says there are remains of glazed and painted decoration on the battlements, parapets and kiosks, in red, blue, yellow and white geometric patterns, and takes the dome to have been painted white. [6] Buchanan, writing in 1813, found the parapets and cornices coloured and mostly worn off. [4] O'Malley says traces of coloured enamelled tiles remained on the domes and walls in 1906. [5]

The Lodi form and the Sur style

Brown follows the octagonal tomb through two hundred years. It begins with the tomb of Khan-i Jahan Tilangani at Delhi in 1368–69, grows under the Sayyids and the Lodis, reaches its fullest form under the Suris and ends with the tomb of Adham Khan under the early Mughals. [6] He thought it "somewhat of an irony" that the finest example of the Lodi type was built at Sasaram, five hundred miles from Delhi and some time after the Lodi rule ended. [6] He explains this by Sher Shah's character: the Delhi tombs, he says, belong to a ruling power approaching its decline, and Sher Shah showed in his buildings "the vigour and audacity of a fresh and rising personality". [6]

O'Malley called it one of the noblest specimens of Pathan architecture in India, and the Rohtas district page, in nearly the same words, calls it the best specimen of Pathan architecture. [5, 7] Abbas reports what Sher Shah built when he held Delhi. He destroyed the old city, rebuilt it on the Jumna and put up two forts, and in the governor's fort a jama masjid of stone, "in the ornamenting of which much gold, lapis lazuli, and other precious articles were expended". [1] The mosque is the Qal'a-i Kuhna, and Brown calls it the prime example of Delhi building in the Sur period and the source of much of Mughal design. [6] Brown puts Sasaram earlier and in a different class. It closes the Lodi tradition, while the Delhi mosque points toward the Mughals. [6]

The architect

The district page names Mir Muhammad Aliwal Khan as the designer. [7] Brown writes his name as Aliwal Khan and says that Sher Shah procured a master-builder "trained in the imperial tradition" so that the family tombs would be true to style. Hasan Khan's was the first commission, and the larger tomb that followed was far beyond it. [6]

O'Malley records a tradition of the town. Aliwal Khan was the officer in charge of building Sher Shah's tomb, and he used his position to take the best stone for his own tomb. That ruined tomb stands south of the town, with its east and west walls still up and carving round the main door. [5] Brown counts it among the Sasaram group, as a memorial to the architect. [6]

O'Malley also quotes a different view. The high base and the surrounding water are common features of Hindu temples, he says, and together with Hindu corbelling and flat architraves in the inner doorways they seemed to him to show that the architect was a Hindu. [5] That is a colonial official's inference from the forms, and it sits uneasily with the name the town gives. Brown, who had the same buildings in front of him, does not repeat it. [6]

Finished by his son

Sher Shah died in the siege of Kalinjar in 1545. [1] The tomb was begun in his lifetime and finished in the reign of his son Islam Shah. [7] Brown thinks the planning of the Sasaram group belongs to the decade before 1540; the district page dates the tomb between 1540 and 1545. [6, 7] The sources do not settle when work began.

Islam Shah's own tomb was never finished. His body was brought from Gwalior and laid at Sasaram near his father's. [2] It stands in another lake, half a mile north-west of Sher Shah's. O'Malley and Buchanan describe an octagonal base 10 to 15 feet high with some of its arches turned, and a stone causeway of eleven spans laid on beams and brackets. It was meant to be larger still. [4, 5] Brown says it was the last building project of the Sur dynasty. [6] The date of Islam Shah's death varies: the chronicle summarised by Elliot and Dowson gives 26 Dhu al-Hijja 961, in November 1554, while Brown writes 1552 and O'Malley 1553. [2, 5, 6]

Two travellers and a ruin

The tomb nearly went the way of the Delhi palaces. William Hodges, a painter, went to Sasaram in the rainy season of 1783, in a palanquin through flooded ground, to make drawings. "I could not but be greatly struck with the grandeur of this monument," he wrote, "rising from the center of a large square lake". Walking round the lake, he judged it to be more than a mile. The bridge had gone, and trees had taken root in the stonework. [3]

Buchanan came in January 1813. The bridge had fallen, and the island could be reached only on a raft of bamboos supported on large earthen pitchers, made when a visitor wanted one. [4] Fig trees were growing on the walls, and tombs of every kind crowded the banks. [4] He wrote that Sher Shah had left an endowment for the upkeep of the tomb, and that the Mughals, who affected to despise him as a usurper, "had the meanness to resume this", so that the place was neglected ever after. [4] That is Buchanan's explanation, and no chronicle he cites supports it.

The government restored the building in 1882. The cupola on the dome, which Buchanan saw standing on four pillars, was taken down and replaced by a pinnacle like the one on Hasan Khan's tomb, and a causeway 360 feet long was built to join the tomb to the north bank. [5] By 1906 the tomb, Hasan Khan's tomb and the old bath were the monuments of Sasaram kept up by the government. [5]

The tomb today

The tomb is a protected monument. Its surroundings are not empty. In December 2025 the National Monuments Authority published bye-laws for it, after taking objections and suggestions, and the draft had been published on 21 December 2021. [8] They say that new buildings near it should be in harmony with its architectural style, and that cladding and panelling on façades should not be allowed. [8] The authority notes that the land around is mostly cultivated, open ground, houses and institutions, and that Sasaram's city plan for 2010 to 2030 gave no land-use guidelines for it. [8]

Visitors reach the tomb by a causeway from the north bank, past a small domed building at the lake's edge. [7] The district page calls it "the second Taj Mahal of India". [7]