Sena dynasty

From Karnataka to Bengal

The Senas claimed descent from a Karnataka lineage — their inscriptions call them Karṇāṭa kṣatriyas of the Brahma-kṣatriya order — and they appear in Bengal as feudatories of the Pālas before displacing them. Vijayasena, in the early twelfth century, made the family the paramount power of the region; his grandson Lakṣmaṇasena ruled for some three decades from around 1178.

Their rule completed the Brahmanical reorientation of Bengal. The Senas endowed brahmin settlements systematically, and Ballālasena is credited by later tradition with the institution of kulīnism, the ranking of brahmin and kāyastha families by purity of descent, whose social consequences in Bengal lasted into the twentieth century. The attribution is traditional and is not documented in contemporary sources.

Lakṣmaṇasena's court

The Sena court was among the most distinguished literary centres of its age. Jayadeva composed the Gītagovinda there — the Sanskrit song-cycle on Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa that shaped Vaiṣṇava devotion, music and dance across India. Dhoyī, Umāpatidhara and Govardhana were also of this court, and Śrīdharadāsa's anthology preserves much of its verse.

Ballālasena himself wrote works on ritual and on cosmology, which is unusual among Indian kings.

The conquest

In about 1204 Ikhtiyar al-Din Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji, a Turkish commander in the Ghurid service, reached Nadia with a small advance party — the Persian chronicler Minhaj gives the figure of eighteen horsemen — and took the town by surprise while Lakṣmaṇasena was at his meal. The king escaped by river to eastern Bengal, where his sons ruled at Vikramapura, in ancient India (modern-day Bangladesh), for another generation.

The story of the eighteen horsemen comes from a single source written half a century later and has been repeated as an emblem of Sena unpreparedness; whatever its accuracy, the outcome is not in doubt. Bengal west of the Ganga passed to the Delhi Sultanate's orbit, and the great Buddhist monasteries of Bihar — Nālandā, Vikramaśīla, Odantapurī — were destroyed in the same campaigns.