Bahadur Shah of Gujarat
Bahadur Shah of Gujarat took Malwa and sacked Chittor, lost his kingdom to Humayun and got it back, let the Portuguese build a fort at Diu to pay for the getting back, and drowned beside their governor's ship after a quarrel about which of them had meant to seize the other. He was a younger son of Muzaffar Shah II, left the court after a quarrel and was at Delhi and Jaunpur when his father died in 1526; he came home, had his brother the sultan poisoned and another brother blinded, and took the throne in the year Babur took Delhi. The kingdom he had was the richest on the western coast of India, with Cambay's trade and Champaner's fort, and he used it. He annexed the sultanate of Malwa in 1531, took the Rajput fortress of Chittor in March 1535 after a siege in which the women of the fort burned themselves, and was at the height of his power when Humayun, whom he had sheltered enemies of, came south the same year, beat him at Mandsaur, took Mandu and Champaner, and drove him to the coast. He had already bought the Portuguese. The treaty of Bassein of December 1534 had given them that town and its islands, one of which is Bombay, and in 1535 he let them build a fort at Diu in return for ships and guns against the Mughals. Humayun went back north in 1536 to face Sher Shah and Bahadur recovered Gujarat within the year, and then wanted the Portuguese out of Diu. In February 1537 he went aboard the ship of the governor Nuno da Cunha to negotiate, each side having come with a plan to detain the other; there was a fight on the deck as he left, his boat was overturned, and he was killed in the water at thirty. The Gujarati chronicles blame the Portuguese and the Portuguese blamed him. His nephew succeeded as a boy under regents, the Portuguese kept Diu against two sieges, and Akbar took the sultanate in 1573. Diu stayed Portuguese until 1961.
- Lived: 1506 CE – 1537 CE
- Nationality: Gujarati
- Roles: sultan, monarch
