Sher Shah Suri: the Afghan who drove the Mughals out of Delhi

From Farid to Sher Khan

Sher Shah's birth name was Farid. Olaf Caroe writes that his grandfather Ibrahim was the first of the family to come to India, as a dealer in horses between Ghazni and Hindustan, like many Ghilzai before him, and that Farid's father Hasan took service with Sikandar, the second Lodi sultan, and received a jagir at Sasaram in Bihar. [1] Ibrahim's family belonged to the Sur section of the Lodi tribe, who had come down to India after the first Lodi sultan, Bahlul, invited Afghan tribesmen to take up estates there. [1]

Legend, Caroe notes, gave Farid the name Sher Khan, from the lion (or tiger) he was said to have killed in single combat. He was entrusted with the management of the family estates, and the chronicler Abbas Sarwani, who wrote in Akbar's time, preserves a speech Sher Khan is said to have made to the tenants at Sasaram: he promised to look after the cultivators, to punish collectors who took more than they should, and to visit each village himself. Caroe thinks claims that his methods founded Akbar's later revenue system are an exaggeration, though he calls Sher Shah's way of going to the spot and seeing things for himself an admired model among Pashtun administrators. [1]

The defeat of Humayun

Before his victories over Humayun, Sher Khan took the Bihar fort of Rohtas. Caroe repeats the story that he did it by sending warriors into the fort in palanquins disguised as women, and a Mughal painting from about 1600 depicts the capture of Rohtasgarh by stratagem. [1] Stephen Dale's survey of Indo-Persian histories adds that Haydar Mirza Dughlat's memoir describes Humayun's disastrous defeat at the hands of a resurgent Afghan force in 1539 and 1540. [4] Caroe places the two decisive battles at Chausa on the Ganges, below Benares, and then near Kannauj higher up the river. [1]

Caroe gives an anecdote of Chausa that he thinks typical of the Afghan warrior at his best. Humayun, bathing when the alarm sounded, plunged his horse into the river and was saved from drowning only by a faithful follower, while the Pathans captured his camp with the women of his family. Sher Khan, according to the chronicle, dismounted, bowed to the queen, posted a guard around her tent and sent the women under escort to the Bihar Rohtas, where they were looked after and later released. [1] After the victories Sher Khan took Delhi and assumed the title Sher Shah. [1] The Iranica entry on the architecture of the Delhi sultanate says that he ruled Delhi from 1540 to 1545. [3]

Humayun was driven first to Lahore and then, after his brother Kamran refused to help, out of India by the Sind and Kandahar route; Caroe says he did not return for sixteen years. [1] The Iranica entry on Kandahar tells of Humayun's attempt in 1543 to reach Kandahar, where his own brother Askari was governor, and how he was forced instead into Safavid Iran. [5]

Governing north India

Sher Shah reigned only five or six years. Caroe describes him as ruthless to the upstart, the rebel and the embezzler and merciful to the poor, and says he built roads and caravanserais up and down the country. [1] Caroe, writing in 1958, calls him the most illustrious Afghan in history. That is a judgment of his own, and a view not all historians share. [1] Where he drew his soldiers matters: Caroe stresses that Sher Shah recruited Afghans, and that when thousands of tribesmen from Roh, the Pashtun homeland, came to his camp at Khushab on the Jhelum, he greeted the holy man Shaikh Bayazid Sarwani in Pashto. [1]

His rule did not reach far into the Pashtun homelands. According to Caroe, he never extended his authority north of the Margalla pass beyond Rawalpindi, and his kingdom just touched the Indus in Niazi country near Kalabagh. When his governor killed Niazi chiefs in a betrayal that Sher Shah himself condemned, the story illustrates both the limits of his control and the Pashtun conventions about hospitality and safe-conduct. [1]

Rohtas and the Old Fort

In the north of what is now Pakistan Sher Shah built the great fort at Rohtas. UNESCO, which inscribed it on the World Heritage list, says that after his defeat of Humayun he built a strong fortified complex there. Its walls run for more than 4 km, are lined with bastions and have monumental gateways, and the fort was never taken by storm. UNESCO calls it an exceptional example of early Muslim military architecture in Central and South Asia. [2] Caroe adds that it took longer to build than his reign lasted, since a visitor in 1839 reported ten years of work. [1]

At Delhi, Catherine Asher notes, Sher Shah built the Qal'a-i Kuhna mosque in the Din-panah quarter. Its sanctuary has a single aisle of three bays, a form unique in India but favoured specifically by Afghan families such as the Suris at that time, and its ornament may show Persian influence. [3] Sher Shah was buried at Sasaram, in a tomb on a stone terrace in the middle of a large tank. [1]

Death and the end of the dynasty

Caroe writes that Sher Shah died in 1545, killed by an accidental explosion of gunpowder at the siege of the fortress of Kalinjar in the Bundelkhand hills. [1] Stephen Dale dates the rule of the Afghan Suris in north India as lasting briefly between 1540 and 1555, after which the Mughals returned. [4]

Caroe preserves a story from the chronicles, which he presents as an insight into Sher Shah's strategy, that on one occasion he was seen sighing and explained that four wishes would go with him to the grave. They included resettling the tribes of Roh on the plains between the Indus and Lahore, so that they could watch for invasion from Kabul, and building fifty rest-houses on the road to Mecca. [1] The anecdote is a later tradition, not a contemporary record.

The sources

The main history of Sher Shah, by Abbas Sarwani, was written in Akbar's time. Dale observes that the period from the Lodis to the Suris is something of a gap in Indo-Persian historiography. The Lodi Afghans were less closely tied to the Persian cultural world, some prominent Lodis did not know Persian at all, and Pashto was not at that time a literary language. A few contemporary works exist, among them Ahmad Yadgar's Tarikh-i Shahi, also called the Makhzan-i Afghani, which covers 1451 to 1558. [4] Most histories of the Afghans were written in the Timurid and Mughal period. [4] The details of Sher Shah's life therefore reach us largely through later writers, and this article follows Caroe's retelling of them, which is itself a secondary source. [1] [4]