The delta country
Chandradwip lay in the tidal country of what is now the Barisal division of Bangladesh — a landscape of rivers and islands where authority depended on boats and where central power was correspondingly hard to impose. Its rajas were counted among the Baro-Bhuyans, the confederacy of landholders who fought the Mughal advance into eastern Bengal for decades.
The kingdom is remembered in the sources chiefly for a catastrophe. The cyclone and storm surge of 1584, described by the Jesuit Fernão Guerreiro and in Mughal accounts, destroyed the capital and killed a very large part of the population — an early record of the storms that have shaped the human geography of the Bengal delta ever since.
The house was reduced by the Mughals in the seventeenth century and its territory absorbed into the revenue system, its later heads becoming zamindars.
Further reading
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Dimock, Edward C. The Place of the Hidden Moon. University of Chicago Press, 1966
- Eaton, Richard M. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier. University of California Press, 1993
- Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.