Bengal Sultanate

Independence

Bengal had been under Delhi's authority intermittently since 1204, and distance made that authority hard to enforce. In 1352 Shams al-Din Ilyas Shah united the delta's three Sultanate provinces and made himself independent; Firuz Shah Tughlaq's two expeditions failed to reverse it, and Bengal remained separate until Akbar.

The sultanate was rich. Bengal exported rice, cotton and silk, and Chinese, Arab and European visitors describe it as among the most prosperous regions of Asia. Ma Huan, with Zheng He's fleet, and later the Portuguese, both remarked on its abundance, and Ibn Battuta had already called it a hell full of good things — meaning that the climate was oppressive and the cost of living astonishingly low.

Bengali

The sultans' most durable act was linguistic. They patronised translation and composition in Bengali rather than only in Persian — the Rāmāyaṇa translated by Krittibas, the Mahābhārata by Kavindra Parameshvar under a Hussain Shahi general's patronage, and the Śrīkṛṣṇa-vijaya of Maladhar Basu, who received his title from a sultan.

That patronage matters because it was not obvious: a Persianate Muslim court sponsoring the vernacular rendering of Hindu epics is a fact that resists the categories usually applied to the period. Bengali as a literary language dates substantially from these courts.

Alauddin Hussain Shah, ruling from 1494, was also the sultan under whom Caitanya's Vaiṣṇava movement began in Nadia; two of his senior officers, Rupa and Sanatana Goswami, left his service to become Caitanya's principal theologians.

Architecture and end

Bengal's sultanate architecture is distinct from anything in northern India: brick rather than stone, with terracotta ornament, curved cornices derived from the region's thatched roof forms, and multiple domes over short squat columns. The Adina mosque at Pandua, built in 1373, was among the largest mosques in the subcontinent; the Sixty Dome Mosque at Bagerhat and the Chota Sona Masjid are the finest survivors.

The curved Bengali roofline entered Mughal architecture as the bangla or bangaldar form and travelled from there across northern India and into Sikh and Rajput building.

The sultanate fell to Akbar's armies at the battle of Rajmahal in 1576, and Bengal became a Mughal province.