Subah Bengal: Bengal Under the Mughals and the Rise of Dhaka

Subah Bengal — in Persian, Subah Bangalah — was the Mughal Empire's province of Bengal, and for most of its existence its richest. It took shape in 1576, when Akbar's armies destroyed the independent Bengal Sultanate, and it lasted, in name and then increasingly in fact under its own hereditary nawabs, until the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The subah covered the Bengal delta and the plains around it — roughly today's Bangladesh and West Bengal — and from the 1650s it also included Orissa; after 1733 its ruler governed Bihar as well. Its capitals trace its history: Rajmahal, then Dhaka, raised to an imperial city as Jahangirnagar, and finally Murshidabad. What follows is the political story of the province: a conquest that took nearly four decades to complete, a century of unusually capable governors, an economy that drew merchants from across Europe and Asia, and a rapid unravelling in the 1740s and 1750s.

The Conquest of Bengal, 1574–1576

Bengal in the 1570s was ruled by the Afghan Karrani dynasty, the last line of the Bengal Sultanate. Its sultan, Daud Khan Karrani, struck coins and had the khutba read in his own name — the classic assertions of sovereignty — and refused to acknowledge Akbar. Mughal forces invaded in 1574, taking Patna, Tanda and much of western Bengal. At Tukaroi on 3 March 1575 Daud was defeated by the Mughal general Munim Khan, and by the Treaty of Katak (12 April 1575) he ceded Bengal and Bihar to the empire, keeping only Orissa. When Munim Khan died later that year, Daud recovered most of Bengal, and Akbar sent a fresh army under Husain Quli Beg, titled Khan-i-Jahan.

The decisive battle came at Rajmahal on 12 July 1576. Daud's army broke when his commander Junaid was killed by a cannonball; Daud himself was captured after his horse became stuck in a quagmire, and Khan-i-Jahan ordered his execution. Banglapedia's judgement is that the battle of Rajmahal "inaugurated the Mughal rule in Bengal". The Karrani sultanate was finished, and Akbar organised Bengal as one of the original twelve subahs of the empire, under a subahdar (governor) appointed from Delhi. A revenue settlement followed: Raja Todar Mal completed the assessment of Bengal in 1582, dividing the province into nineteen sarkars, the fiscal districts on which Mughal administration rested.

But victory at Rajmahal decided far less than it appeared to. The empire now held the west of Bengal; the eastern delta — the Bhati, the low river country of Dhaka, Sonargaon and Bikrampur — remained in the hands of men who had no intention of submitting.

The Baro-Bhuiyans and the Completion of the Conquest, 1576–1612

Resistance in the east was led by Isa Khan Masnad-i-Ala, the zamindar of Sonargaon, who built a confederacy of the delta's landed chiefs — the Baro-Bhuiyans, the "twelve landlords" of Bengali tradition — together with refugee Afghan officers of the fallen sultanate. Isa Khan's strength was naval: in a country of rivers, his war-boats made Mughal columns slow, exposed and repeatedly beaten back. Akbar's generals, including Raja Man Singh, campaigned in Bengal for years without breaking the confederacy. Isa Khan died in 1599, still undefeated, and his son Musa Khan inherited both his territory and the leadership of the resistance.

The end came under Jahangir, who in 1608 appointed Islam Khan Chishti as subahdar with explicit instructions to finish the conquest. Islam Khan built up a fleet, advanced methodically through the delta, and in mid-1610 occupied Dhaka. Judging Rajmahal too distant from the theatre of war, he transferred the provincial capital to Dhaka in 1610 and renamed the city Jahangirnagar, after the emperor. (The story of the city's own growth from this period onward is told in our profile of Dhaka.) Musa Khan was forced to submit by the end of 1611. The last independent chief, the Afghan Khwaja Usman, retreated into the hills of south Sylhet and was killed fighting at Daulambapur on 12 March 1612. With his death organised resistance collapsed. By 1612, Islam Khan — who died in office the following year — had brought the whole of Bengal except Chittagong under Mughal control: thirty-six years after Rajmahal, the conquest was finally real.

A Century of Subahdars

For the rest of the seventeenth century Bengal was governed by imperial subahdars, several of them princes of the blood. Shah Shuja, Aurangzeb's brother, reorganised the province in the 1650s into twenty-four sarkars and attached Orissa to it — making the subah, on paper, one of the largest in the empire. His successor Mir Jumla pushed Mughal arms into Cooch Behar and Assam in 1662–63, an overextended campaign from which he did not return; he died in 1663.

The outstanding subahdar of the century was Shaista Khan, Aurangzeb's maternal uncle, who governed Bengal from 1664 to 1688, with a break of just over a year in 1678–79 — the longest tenure in the province's Mughal history. His administration is remembered in Bengal for stable prices, building works in Dhaka, and above all for closing the province's last open frontier.

Shaista Khan and the Capture of Chittagong, 1666

Chittagong, Bengal's great seaport, had been under Arakanese control since before the Mughal conquest, and Arakanese (Magh) fleets, crewed partly by Portuguese renegades, raided deep into the delta for slaves and plunder. Successive subahdars had failed against Arakan's navy. Shaista Khan spent his first two years in Bengal building a war fleet of several hundred vessels and detaching the Portuguese sailors from Arakanese service with offers of Mughal pay. His forces first took the island of Sandwip in November 1665. The main expedition — commanded on land and water by his son Buzurg Umid Khan, with Ibn Husain as admiral, and supplied by Shaista Khan himself — set out in the last week of December 1665. The fort of Chittagong was besieged and captured on 26 January 1666. Chittagong was annexed to the subah, placed under a Mughal faujdar, and renamed Islamabad; fleeing Arakanese power never recovered it, and the delta's rivers became markedly safer. The annexation of 1666 completed, ninety years on, the territorial conquest begun in 1576.

Shaista Khan's later years brought friction with the English East India Company, whose servants chafed at customs and at the subahdar's restrictions; the quarrel escalated into the Anglo-Mughal War of 1686–1690, in which the Company was expelled from Bengal and then readmitted on imperial terms, founding Calcutta in 1690. It was an early sign of how much of Bengal's future would turn on its foreign trade.

Revenue, Trade and the Muslin Economy

Bengal's importance to the empire was fiscal before it was anything else. Banglapedia describes it flatly as "the richest province of the Empire", and Aurangzeb is reported to have called it the "paradise of nations". The basis was a wet-rice agriculture of exceptional fertility, assessed through the revenue system Todar Mal had set in 1582 and later settlements refined. Under Murshid Quli Khan's management of the finances from 1702, Bengal began remitting a regular one crore of rupees a year to the imperial treasury at Delhi — a flow no other province matched so reliably. James Grant's analysis of Bengal's finances, compiled for the East India Company in 1788, put the khalsa (crown) revenue of Murshid Quli Khan's Bengal at just over Rs 1.04 crore, a figure that conveys the scale of the surplus the province generated.

Trade carried the surplus outward. Bengal exported rice, sugar, raw silk, saltpetre and, above all, cotton textiles. The fine muslins woven in and around Dhaka and Sonargaon — made from the local phuti karpas cotton and famous across Asia and Europe — were the province's signature product; one period estimate values the 1747 export of Dhaka cotton goods, chiefly muslin, at Rs 28.5 lakh, including cloth procured for the emperor and the nawab's court. The Portuguese, settled at Hooghly and Bandel from 1579, dominated the European carrying trade until the Mughals sacked Hooghly and expelled them in 1632. Their successors lined the Bhagirathi: the Dutch at Chinsurah, the French at Chandernagore, the English first at Hooghly and then at Calcutta. All three maintained factories in Dhaka itself — the Dutch from 1663, the English from 1669 and the French from 1682 — buying muslin through the advance-contract (dadni) system. Bengal's economy in this period is sometimes described in much larger claims, such as fixed percentages of the empire's total output; such figures rest on modern reconstructions rather than Mughal records, and the Mughal-era evidence supports a more modest statement: no province sent Delhi more money, and few regions in the world exported more fine cloth.

Murshid Quli Khan and the Nawabi Turn, 1700–1727

The transformation of the subah into a hereditary nawabi began with a revenue official. Murshid Quli Khan was sent to Bengal as diwan in 1701 (Aurangzeb's appointment dates to about 1700) to repair finances neglected during the war of succession intrigues of the subahdar Azim-us-Shan, the emperor's grandson. He proved ruthlessly effective: he made good the arrears, started the annual crore-rupee remittance to Delhi, and built his own power base away from Dhaka, where he felt unsafe. In December 1702 the emperor gave him the title Murshid Quli Khan and permission to rename Makhsusabad, the town where he had placed his revenue office, as Murshidabad.

Aurangzeb's death in 1707 loosened Bengal's tie to Delhi in practice, though never in form. After intervals of displacement, Murshid Quli Khan returned as diwan in 1710; in 1717 the emperor Farrukhsiyar appointed him subahdar as well, uniting the nizamat (governorship) and the diwani (revenue administration) in one hand — a concentration no Mughal governor was supposed to have. In that year he formally transferred the provincial capital from Dhaka to Murshidabad; Dhaka retained a deputy governor (naib nazim) and much of its trade, but its century as Bengal's capital was over. As ruler he revised the revenue settlement once more in 1722, converting officers' jagirs in Bengal into crown (khalsa) land, farming collection to contractors (ijaradars) bound by security bonds, and fostering a small number of large, accountable zamindaris. He died on 30 June 1727, having founded both a city and, in effect, a dynasty — while still remitting revenue to Delhi and styling himself the emperor's servant.

The Later Nawabs and the Bargi Invasions, 1727–1751

Succession was the nawabi's weakness. Murshid Quli Khan had designated his grandson Sarfaraz Khan as heir, but on his death his son-in-law Shuja-ud-Din Muhammad Khan seized the masnad with the backing of the Jagat Seth bankers and secured imperial confirmation. Shuja-ud-Din ruled ably from 1727 to 1739 and in 1733 added Bihar to his charge. Sarfaraz finally inherited in 1739 but reigned less than a year: Alivardi Khan, the deputy governor of Bihar, defeated and killed him at the Battle of Giria on 10 April 1740 and took the masnad himself, afterwards purchasing imperial ratification of his usurpation.

Alivardi Khan (1740–1756) was a soldier of real ability, and he needed to be. From 1742 the Marathas of Nagpur, under Raghuji Bhonsle, invaded Bengal almost annually to exact chauth — the quarter-share of revenue the Marathas claimed across India. The raiders, remembered in Bengal as the Bargis (from bargir, troopers mounted and armed by the state), burned and looted across the western districts; contemporary Dutch reporting put the deaths in Bengal and Bihar over the decade in the hundreds of thousands, a contemporary estimate that conveys the scale of the catastrophe even if the number cannot be verified. Alivardi campaigned against them every year, resorted in March 1744 to assassinating their commander Bhaskar Pandit and twenty-one of his captains at a parley at Mankara, and still could not keep them out. In the treaty of 1751 he conceded the substance: an annual chauth of twelve lakh rupees, and Orissa — left in the hands of the Maratha nominee Mir Habib as deputy governor, with the Subarnarekha river as the frontier — effectively ceded. Bengal kept its independence from Nagpur, but the richest province of the empire had been shaken, its western districts depopulated, and its treasury drained in the decade before its final crisis.

Plassey and the End of Subah Bengal

Alivardi died on 9 April 1756 and was succeeded by his daughter's son Siraj-ud-Daulah, aged twenty-three. The new nawab inherited his grandfather's enemies and added his own: a court divided against him, the Jagat Seth banking house alienated, and an East India Company that had fortified Calcutta without his permission and abused its trading privileges. Siraj took Calcutta in June 1756; the Company retook it and, rather than accept a subordinate place again, Robert Clive marched to decide the question by battle and conspiracy together. At Plassey on 23 June 1757, with much of the nawab's army standing idle under the compromised Mir Jafar, Siraj's forces collapsed. He was captured and killed within days, and Mir Jafar was installed as a Company-backed nawab.

With Plassey the history of Subah Bengal closes. The province the Mughals had taken ninety years to conquer, and which its nawabs had then ruled for forty years as a state within the empire, passed under the control of a trading company. Its administrative skeleton — the revenue districts, the zamindari structure, the practice of farming collection — long outlived it, first under the Company and then under the British Raj; its capitals tell its story in stone, in the mosques and palaces of old Dhaka and in the ruins of Murshidabad. But the political creation of 1576, the empire's rich eastern province, ended on the field at Plassey.