Bengal Sultanate

An independent Muslim kingdom in the delta that outlasted the empire it broke from and turned decisively local. Bengal had been conquered for the Delhi Sultanate around 1204 and was always awkward to govern from the north - the rivers, the monsoon and the sheer distance made it semi-detached from the start. Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah unified the province and declared independence in 1352, repelling a Delhi invasion and establishing a dynasty that lasted, with an interruption, until 1538. What distinguishes the sultanate is its cultural direction. Its rulers patronised Bengali rather than only Persian, commissioning translations of the Ramayana and Mahabharata into the vernacular, which is a significant moment in the formation of Bengali as a literary language. The court also employed Abyssinian slave-soldiers who briefly seized the throne in the 1480s, and welcomed Chinese embassies from the Ming fleets - a giraffe sent from Bengal reached Beijing in 1414. Gaur and Pandua, its capitals, produced a distinctive brick-and-terracotta mosque architecture using curved roofs borrowed from village huts. The Hussain Shahi dynasty presided over the kingdom's cultural height and over the Vaishnava revival of Chaitanya. Sher Shah Suri took Bengal in 1538, and the Mughals absorbed it after 1576. The sultanate's conversion patterns underlie eastern Bengal's Muslim majority. Gaur's Adina mosque was among the largest in the subcontinent when it was built. The Bengali calendar still in use dates from this general period. Chittagong was the kingdom's main port. Portuguese traders reached the delta shortly before the sultanate fell. Gaur is now split by the India-Bangladesh border, with the ruins lying on both sides of it.

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