Sur Empire

Sher Shah

Farid Khan, an Afghan of modest standing who took the name Sher Khan after killing a tiger, rose through service in Bihar to defeat the Mughal emperor Humayun at Chausa in 1539 and again at Kannauj in 1540, driving him into fifteen years of exile in Persia. He ruled as Sher Shah for five years and died in 1545 at the siege of Kalinjar when a rocket exploded against a wall.

In those five years he did more to shape the administration of northern India than most rulers achieve in fifty.

The reforms

He rebuilt and extended the trunk road from Bengal to the Indus — the Sadak-e-Azam, later the Grand Trunk Road — planting trees along it, sinking wells, and building caravanserais at intervals with separate accommodation for Hindu and Muslim travellers and a horse relay for the post. The road remains one of the principal arteries of the subcontinent.

He standardised the currency, issuing a silver coin of about 178 grains called the rupiya and a copper dam, and fixed the exchange between them. The rupee descends directly from that coin.

His land settlement, executed by Todar Mal, measured cultivated land, classified it by productivity, and fixed the state's share as a proportion of the average yield, recorded in a written agreement with each cultivator. Todar Mal afterwards entered Akbar's service and applied the same system there; the Mughal revenue administration for which Akbar is celebrated is in substance Sher Shah's.

The end

His successors quarrelled, and Humayun returned from Persia to retake Delhi in 1555, dying the following year in a fall from his library stairs. Akbar's accession at thirteen followed.

Sher Shah's tomb at Sasaram, standing on a terrace in the middle of an artificial lake, is among the finest buildings of pre-Mughal India, and the Purana Qila in Delhi with its Qila-i-Kuhna mosque is his.