Sur Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sur Empire seized control of almost the entire Mughal heartland in northern India and held it for fewer than two decades. Sher Shah Suri, the Afghan-origin founder of the dynasty, drove the Mughal emperor Humayun out of India and built an administration so efficient that Humayun's own descendants would later borrow its blueprints. The empire stretched from eastern Balochistan in the west to what is now Rakhine in Myanmar in the east. Its capital was not Delhi, but Sasaram in modern Bihar, the town where Sher Shah would eventually be buried in a tomb he commissioned himself, rising 122 feet from the middle of an artificial lake. What made a dynasty of Afghan origin capable of displacing the heirs of Babur? And why, despite ruling for barely a generation, did it leave marks that outlasted it by centuries? Those questions run through every chapter of this story.

• 2. The Road to Power

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  Sher Shah's grandfather, Ibrahim Khan Sur, arrived in the Indian subcontinent from a ridge called Shar-gari in the Afghan tongue, a spur of the Sulaiman Mountains on the banks of the Gumal River. He came in the era of Sultan Bahlul Lodi, and his family entered the service of Muhabbat Khan Sur, settling in the pargana of Bajwara in the Punjab. From that modest beginning, the Sur clan climbed through service and warfare across generations.

  By 1537, Sher Shah's campaigns against the Bengal Sultanate had grown alarming enough that Bengal's ruler called on the Mughal emperor Humayun for help. Humayun mobilized his army in July 1537 and marched to the fort at Chunar, besieging it from November 1537 for more than six months before it fell. Sher Shah meanwhile invaded Bengal a second time. Gauda fell to Afghan forces in April 1538, and the fort of Rohtasgarh came under Sur control in March 1538, giving Sher Shah a secure base to store Afghan families and the war's plunder. He held his first coronation after Gauda fell.

  After Humayun finally seized Gauda on the 8th of September 1538, he found a hollowed city: the Afghans had stripped the treasury and abandoned the place. Stuck at Gauda by monsoon rains, Humayun lost the initiative while Sher Shah seized Bihar and Varanasi, recovered Chunar, laid siege to Jaunpur, and cut Humayun's communication lines. When Humayun tried to slip away by crossing the Karmanasa River, Sher Shah caught him exposed and attacked. The Battle of Chausa ended in the complete rout of the Mughals. Humayun barely escaped alive; more than 7,000 of his men did not.

  Humayun regrouped, raised a force of 40,000, and met Sher Shah at Kannauj with both armies facing each other across the Ganges. As fighting broke out, Mughal nobles began hiding their insignia to avoid being identified. The army collapsed, and Humayun fled to Sindh. On the 17th of May 1540, Sher Shah was crowned a second time as Emperor of Northern India, taking also the epithet Sultan Adil, meaning Just King. He then captured Delhi.

• 3. The Art of Administration

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  Sher Shah placed Sasaram, in Bihar, at the center of his empire, and the eastern orientation of his rule showed in a striking way: of the 16 silver mint cities he established, 8 were concentrated in the region between Chunar and Fathabad. That geographic weighting reflected where he thought power truly resided.

  The Sur Empire's territory was organized into Iqtas, the large provincial units. Military governors commanded the biggest of these; Haibat Khan governed the Punjab with over 30,000 men under his authority and the power to award jagirs to his own soldiers. Khwas Khan ruled Rajasthan and could field more than 20,000. Below the Iqtas sat the Sarkars, each with two chief officers: the Shiqdar, who handled civil administration and could deploy 200 to 300 soldiers, and the Munsif, responsible for revenue collection and civil justice. Each Sarkar subdivided further into Parganas, moderately sized towns with surrounding villages, each staffed by its own Shiqdar, Munsif, a treasurer called the Fotdar, and a Karkun literate in both Hindi and Persian. Villages retained their own Panchayat assemblies of elders, and Sher Shah respected this local autonomy rather than displacing it.

  Courts met under Qadis, and Sher Shah himself observed civil cases. The criminal law was deliberately harsh, designed so that the fear of punishment deterred crime. The reform of self-responsibility was particularly striking: officials were required to solve crimes in their jurisdictions, and if a murderer went uncaught, the responsible official could be hanged. Historians have praised this system for its effectiveness. Merchants, it was said, could sleep in the open desert without fear of bandits.

• 4. Coins, Roads, and Trade

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  Sher Shah introduced the system of tri-metalism that would come to define Mughal coinage. Gold coins called the Mohur weighed 169 grains. The copper coin was called the Paisa. Most consequentially, he gave the term rupee a fixed meaning: a silver coin of a standard weight of 178 grains. Before his reign, the word rupya had been a generic name for any silver coin. Numismatists Goron and Goenka have noted that coins dated AH 945, corresponding to 1538, show Sher Shah had already assumed the royal title of Farid al-Din Sher Shah and was striking coins in his own name before the Battle of Chausa settled the question of who ruled northern India. The rupee Sher Shah standardized remains the national currency today in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Maldives, Seychelles, and Indonesia.

  The Grand Trunk Road, which runs from what is now Bangladesh all the way to Afghanistan, was rebuilt and modernized under Sher Shah. Caravanserais and mosques went up along its entire length. Trees were planted on both sides to shade travelers. Wells were dug along the western section. A postal relay system carried mail by horse riders working in stages.

  On trade, Sher Shah abolished the border taxes between provinces, leaving only two levies in place: one on goods entering the country, and one on goods at the point of sale. Internal customs were removed entirely. Sher Shah also planned a new road from Lahore to Multan, a project connected to his second Punjab campaign in 1543.

• 5. Campaigns and Confrontations

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  After Bengal, Sher Shah turned north. He captured Lahore in November 1540, with Afghan armies reaching as far as the Khyber Pass. He chose not to push the empire beyond the Indus, unwilling to absorb independent-minded Afghan clans and risk internal trouble. Multan fell in 1541, but the Mughals were no longer considered a serious threat, and the advance stopped.

  The Gakhars, however, were another matter. They had been difficult to subjugate for generations and had maintained friendly relations with the Mughals since Babur's time. Sher Shah tried diplomacy first, inviting the Gakhar chief Sarang Khan to acknowledge him as emperor of India. Sarang Khan's reply was a bow, an arrow, and a lion cub, a gesture of open defiance. Sher Shah marched through the Punjab, killed Sarang Khan, devastated much of the countryside, and took many prisoners. He then ordered construction of the Rohtas Fort to keep the Gakhars in check, leaving 50,000 men in the Punjab before turning back east.

  In 1542, fear that Malwa might align with the Mughals prompted a campaign into central India. Led by Shujaat Khan, the Afghan forces subjugated Gwalior, then advanced to Sarangpur. The ruler of the Malwa Sultanate, Qadir Khan, abandoned by his own vassals, begged Sher Shah for mercy. Sher Shah treated him generously and even gave him a jagir in Bengal. Qadir Khan rejected the offer and fled to Gujarat. In the campaigns that followed, Shujaat Khan defeated Qadir Khan's coalition despite being outnumbered and was rewarded with more than 12,000 horses.

  In 1543, Sher Shah marched into Marwar with a force of 80,000 cavalry against the Rajput king Maldeo Rathore, who commanded 50,000. Rather than press the enemy directly, Sher Shah halted at the village of Sammel in the pargana of Jaitaran, ninety kilometres east of Jodhpur. Supply difficulties for his large army grew critical after a month of skirmishing. Sher Shah's response was deception: he dropped forged letters near the Maldeo camp, letters that falsely suggested some of Maldeo's own commanders were secretly pledging help to the Afghans. Maldeo, shaken by suspicion, withdrew to Jodhpur, leaving his generals Jaita and Kumpa to fight alone. They fought the Afghan force of 80,000 with only a few thousand men and some cannons. The battle of Sammel cost Sher Shah several generals and thousands of casualties, but he won. His general Khawas Khan Marwat occupied Jodhpur and the territory from Ajmer to Mount Abu in 1544.

• 6. The Siege of Raisin

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  After Bahadur Shah of Gujarat died, Puran Mall recovered control of Raisin, which Bahadur Shah had annexed in 1532. Puran Mall then committed acts of violence against the Muslim population of the city. Survivors developed lasting grievances, and word reached Sher Shah.

  Sher Shah offered Puran Mall a deal: cede Raisin and receive Varanasi in exchange. Puran Mall refused. War was declared. The Afghan army under Jalal Khan reached Vidisha, merged with Sher Shah's forces, and marched on Raisin. The siege lasted six months until artillery destroyed the city's defenses. Puran Mall surrendered under terms: free passage for himself and his family, Sher Shah's withdrawal to two marches' distance from the fort, and oaths sworn by Adil Khan and Qutab Khan that Puran Mall and his family would not be harmed.

  The episode illustrates how Sher Shah's religious convictions and his code of justice could override the terms of a formal agreement when he believed a deeper wrong demanded it.

• 7. Death and What Followed

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  After Marwar, Sher Shah besieged Kalinjar Fort in 1544. During the siege, one of his own cannons burst. The gunpowder explosion mortally wounded him. He was carried to his tent and lay there for two days. When messengers brought word that the fort had finally fallen, he said: "Thanks to Almighty God." Sher Shah died on the 22nd of May 1545, aged 73 or 59 according to different accounts. His tomb, which he had commissioned himself, was completed on the 16th of August 1545, three months after his death. It stands 122 feet high in the middle of an artificial lake at Sasaram on the Grand Trunk Road.

  His second son Jalal Khan succeeded him under the title Islam Shah Suri. Islam Shah faced immediate rebellion from his father's amirs. The Niazis under Haibat Khan and Khawas Khan rose against him; Islam Shah defeated them at the battle of Ambala and again at Dhankot, driving Haibat Khan to seek refuge with the Gakhars in 1548. The Gakhars could not be subdued. In 1550, the Niazis tried to push into Kashmir but were defeated at Sambla by Mirza Haidar Dughlat, who sent the heads of Haibat Khan and his family to Islam Shah. Islam Shah then built a chain of fortresses north of Sialkot to guard against both a Mughal return and the hill clans.

  Islam Shah died on the 22nd of November 1554. After his death, the Sur dynasty fractured rapidly, cycling through five rulers in barely two years. The final chapter came in the summer of 1557, when the last significant Sur claimant, Sikandar Shah Suri, held out at Mankot for six months using artillery and matchlocks against Mughal forces led by Bairam Khan. Sikandar surrendered on the 25th of July 1557, was pardoned, and entered the service of the emperor Akbar, though he quickly fell out of favor there too. The Mughal reconquest was complete.

  The administrative structures Sher Shah built did not disappear with the dynasty. They shaped the reforms Akbar would later implement, and the rupee Sher Shah standardized at 178 grains of silver is still the name of the currency across eight countries today.

• 8. Buildings and Memory

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  Rohtas Fort, which Sher Shah constructed to keep the Gakhars in check, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Pakistan. He also built many structures in the Rohtasgarh Fort in Bihar, the Sher Shah Suri Masjid in Patna, and within the Purana Qila complex in Delhi he left two monuments: the Qila-i-Kuhna Mosque and the Sher Mandal, an octagonal building that later served as Humayun's own library after the Mughals returned to power. In 1545, the year of his death, Sher Shah built a new city called Bhera in present-day Pakistan, including a grand masjid named after him.

  The mausoleum at Sasaram drew comparisons that surprised even those who recorded them. The antiquarian Cunningham wrote that he was inclined to prefer it over the Taj Mahal. The tomb stands on an island in its artificial lake, 122 feet high, completed just three months after the man it commemorates died. It was a structure Sher Shah had planned for himself, built while he was still conducting campaigns across northern India. That a ruler so focused on military expansion and administrative reform should have devoted equal attention to the monument that would carry his name forward says something about how he understood permanence. The Sur Empire lasted fewer than two decades. The tomb has stood for nearly five centuries.