Murshid Quli Khan
Murshid Quli Khan was a Brahmin boy sold as a slave in the Deccan and raised a Muslim by a Persian official, who became Aurangzeb's revenue officer for Bengal, moved its treasury out of the viceroy's reach to a town he named after himself, and as the emperors weakened after 1707 made the richest province of the empire a hereditary state that sent Delhi its tribute and took no orders; the Nawabs of Bengal whom the East India Company would later replace were his creation. He was born about 1660, was bought by Haji Shafi Isfahani, who took him to Persia and educated him, and entered Mughal service on his master's death; in 1700 Aurangzeb sent him to Bengal as diwan, the revenue chief, to stop the leakage the emperor's own grandson was presiding over as governor. He did it by assessment. The zamindars who could not pay were replaced by those who could, the accounts were kept in his own hand, and the province's remittance to the Deccan camp rose to a crore of rupees a year, which was what kept Aurangzeb's war going. The prince tried to have him murdered in the mosque. He moved the diwan's office in 1704 from Dhaka to Maksudabad on the Bhagirathi, which became Murshidabad. After Aurangzeb's death he served whichever emperor was winning, was made governor as well as diwan in 1717, and from then on chose his own officers, kept his own army, sent the tribute regularly so that Delhi had no reason to complain, and sent nothing else. He was severe with defaulting landholders, whom he is said to have made stand in pits of filth. He was tolerant of the Hindu bankers and clerks who ran his administration, and hostile to the European companies' attempts to buy exemptions, which the English had got from the emperor in 1717 and he ignored. He died in June 1727 and was buried under the steps of the mosque he had built so that the faithful would walk over him; his son-in-law Shuja-ud-Din took the province, and his great-grandson-in-law's descendant Siraj-ud-Daulah lost it at Plassey thirty years later.
- Lived: 1660 CE – 1727 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: nawab, monarch, administrator
