Bengal is a low-lying floodplain laced with numerous rivers and channels, making overland communication and transportation extremely difficult. By the eighth century large, regionally based imperial systems had emerged in the greater delta region, some of them, such as the Palas (750–1161) and Chandras (c.825–1035), patronizing Buddhism and others a revitalized Brahmanism, in particular the Senas (c.1097–1223). The latter, after wresting their independence from their Pala overlords, consolidated their base in western Bengal and then moved into the eastern hinterland. By the early thirteenth century, the centre of civilization and social power in eastern India had moved from Bihar to Bengal, while royal patronage had shifted from a mainly Buddhist to a mainly Hindu orientation. By this time, too, the granting of land to Brahmins who officiated at court rituals had become a kingly duty. As elsewhere in India, kings of the Sena dynasty sought to replicate cosmic order by building monumental stone temples housing an image of their patron overlord.
In 1204, amidst the rapid rise of Ghurid power in upper India, Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalaji, a client of Muhammad Ghuri, overthrew Bengal’s last Sena monarch. The invader’s 10,000 horsemen had overwhelmed the local population, while his propaganda left little doubt regarding the basis of his power. Upon establishing his capital in Lakhnauti, Bakhtiyar Khalaji struck a gold coin in the name of Muhammad Ghuri that depicted a Turkish cavalryman charging at full gallop and holding a mace in his hand. It bore the Sanskrit phrase, ‘On the conquest of Gaur’ (i.e. Bengal). Silver coins struck over the next decade bore a similar horseman image, communicating to the local population a message of brute force. Imposing monuments in the south-western delta dating to the late thirteenth century, such as the Minar of Chhota Pandua or the mosque of Zafar Khan, also announced the presence of Bengal’s new rulers, making no concessions to the aesthetic sensibilities of the delta’s conquered population. In the decades immediately following Bakhtiyar Khalaji’s conquest, Bengal’s provincial masters sought to reproduce in this distant, forested delta the political and cultural vision of north India’s new rulers.
Aided by the delta’s great distance from Delhi, however, the sultanate’s governors in Bengal repeatedly asserted their independence from their north Indian overlords. As early as 1213, Delhi’s governor in Bengal not only proclaimed his autonomy from north India, but even declared himself the right-hand defender of the caliph in Baghdad. In response, Sultan Iltutmish invaded and re-annexed the province. To drive home his own superior claims to association with the caliph the sultan, while still in Bengal, arranged to receive from the caliph in Baghdad a robe of honour, which arrived under a red canopy of state. But Mongol invasions from beyond the Khyber kept the sultans of Delhi preoccupied with defending their north-western flank, enabling subsequent rulers of Bengal repeatedly to assert their independence. As this happened, they adopted ever more exalted titles on their coins and public monuments. In 1281 Balban ruthlessly stamped out one revolt, hunting down and publicly executing his rebel governor in Bengal. Yet within a week of Balban’s death in 1287, his own son, who had been left behind to govern the turbulent province, declared his independence from Delhi. And when the latter’s son rose to the Bengal throne in 1291 as Sultan Rukn al-Din Kaikaus (r. 1291–1300), the new ruler emphatically defied Delhi’s claims to authority by assuming the inflated title of ‘the great Sultan, master of the necks of nations, the king of the kings of Turks and Persians, the lord of the crown, and the seal’, as well as ‘the right hand of the viceregent of God’. He even styled himself ‘the shadow of God’, an honorific derived from ancient Persian imperial usage.
Exasperated with its wayward province, Delhi temporarily ceased mounting costly operations to keep it within its grip. Indeed, the founder of Delhi’s Khalaji dynasty, Sultan Jalal al-Din (r. 1290–96), indicated his disdain for the delta by rounding up 1,000 criminals from the Delhi region, loading them on to boats and floating them down to the Ganges delta where they could be set free.18 Within a century of its conquest, then, Bengal had passed from being a prized possession of the Delhi sultanate, whose capture had occasioned the minting of gold commemorative coins, to a dumping ground for the capital’s social undesirables. We also see in this incident an early manifestation of the sort of north Indian, or, more precisely, Punjabi chauvinism towards the Bengal delta that would be echoed in the aftermath of the Mughal conquest of the region in the late sixteenth century.
During the earlier part of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq’s reign, however, Bengal was once again brought under Delhi’s control, governed from the delta’s three major cities: Lakhnauti in the north-west, Satgaon in the south-west and Sonargaon in the east. But midway through the sultan’s turbulent reign, local rulers in the delta again managed to assert their independence from Delhi. A key player in this drama, Shams al-Din Ilyas, had begun his career in Delhi, but after running foul of the mercurial sultan he fled to Bengal where he took up service with the Tughluq governor of Satgaon. When that governor died in 1338, Ilyas seized power and declared his independence. Four years later, after defeating his rivals in the delta’s other major cities, he proclaimed himself sultan of the whole delta, which he ruled until his death in 1357.
Just as Sufi shaikhs associated with Shaikh Nizam al-Din Auliya had helped plant Delhi’s authority in Bengal, disciples of those same shaikhs helped legitimate Ilyas Shah’s rebellion against Delhi. As a young man, the Bengal-born Akhi Siraj al-Din (d. 1357) had travelled to Delhi where he studied with Nizam al-Din Auliya, returning periodically to his homeland with other servants of his master in Delhi, thereby strengthening the spiritual links between the capital and Bengal. When Nizam al-Din died in 1325, Siraj al-Din returned to the delta, where he inducted others into the Chishti order. Among these was another native Bengali, Shaikh ‘Ala al-Haq (d. 1398), who developed close ties with Sultan Shams al-Din Ilyas Shah soon after the latter had severed his political ties with Delhi.19 From this point on, the sultan and the Sufi formed a mutually supportive relationship. The latter’s son, Nur Qutb-i ‘Alam (d. 1459), attached his fortunes even more firmly to the fate of the Bengal sultanate, seeing himself as its principal spiritual adviser.
One of Ilyas Shah’s first acts as sultan was to move his capital from the old provincial capital of Lakhnauti to the new site of Pandua. Though only thirty kilometres from Lakhnauti, the new capital symbolized his determination to sever all ties with his former overlords in Delhi. Twice in the 1350s Delhi tried but failed to reconquer the delta. Then, for the next two centuries, Bengal was at last left undisturbed by north Indian armies. This long period of political independence contributed to the growth of a distinct Bengali regional identity. Already in the late thirteenth century, Marco Polo had mentioned ‘Bangala’, a place he had apparently heard of from his informants and which he understood as being distinct from India, for he described it as ‘tolerably close to India’, and its people as speaking ‘a peculiar language’.20 An historian of the mid fourteenth century referred to Shams al-Din Ilyas Shah as the ‘sultan of the Bengalis’ and as ‘king of Bengal’.21
Through the medium of architecture, Sikandar Shah (r. 1357–89), the son and successor of the dynasty’s founder, made the most dramatic statement defying Delhi. Completed in 1375 in the capital of Pandua, the Adina mosque signalled both the delta’s political distance from its former masters in Delhi and its patron’s imperial pretensions. With its immense courtyard surrounded by a screen of arches, and bearing no fewer than 370 domed bays, this structure surpassed in size any edifice built in Delhi. It also broke from Delhi’s architectural tradition by asserting its indigenous character. The motifs of its many prayer niches reveal a successful adaptation, and appreciation, of the aesthetic traditions of the delta’s former Pala and Sena rulers.22 On the other hand, it went over the heads of Delhi stylistically, conveying an imperial aura that recalls the grand style of pre-Islamic Persia. The shadowing effect produced by the alternating recesses and projections on the exterior of the multi-storeyed western wall resembles the external façade of the Taq-i Kisra palace of Iran’s Sasanian dynasty (AD 225–641), located in Ctesiphon near modern Baghdad. The mosque’s central nave, moreover, was covered with a huge barrel vault, an unusual feature having no antecedent in India, but which had also been used in the Taq-i Kisra. Finally, whereas Bengal’s earlier rulers had been content with being merely first among ‘kings of the East’, Sultan Sikandar Shah – whose very name, ‘Alexander’, associated him with imperialism – portrayed himself in the mosque’s inscription as the most perfect among the kings of Arabia and Iran, without even mentioning the kings of South Asia, where he was actually ruling.23