The Turkish conquest of the
subcontinent was a long, drawn out process covering several centuries. It began
in Afghanistan with the military forays of Mahmud of Ghazni in
the year 1001. By the early thirteenth century, Bengal fell
to Turkish armies. The last major Hindu Sena ruler
was expelled from his capital at Nadia in Western Bengal in
1202, although lesser Sena rulers held sway for a short while after in Eastern
Bengal.
Bengal was loosely associated with the Delhi
Sultanate, established in 1206, and paid a tribute in war elephants in
order to maintain autonomy. In 1341 Bengal became independent from Delhi,
and Dhaka was established as the seat of the governors of
independent Bengal. Turks ruled Bengal for several decades before the
conquest of Dhaka by forces of the Mughal emperor Akbar
the Great (1556-1605) in 1576.
Bengal remained a Mughal province until the
beginning of the decline of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century.
Under the Mughals, the political integration of Bengal with the rest of the
subcontinent began, but Bengal was never truly subjugated. It was always too
remote from the center of government in Delhi. Because lines of communications
were poor, local governors found it easy to ignore imperial directives and
maintain their independence.
Although Bengal remained provincial, it was
not isolated intellectually, and Bengali religious leaders from the
fifteenth century onward have been influential throughout the subcontinent. The
Mughals in their heyday had a profound and lasting effect on Bengal. When Akbar
ascended the throne at Delhi, a road connecting Bengal with Delhi was under
construction and a postal service was being planned as a step toward drawing
Bengal into the operations of the empire.
Akbar implemented the present-day Bengali
Calendar, and his son, Jahangir (1605-27), introduced
civil and military officials from outside Bengal who received rights to collect
taxes on land. The development of the Zamindar (tax collector
and later landlord) class and its later interaction with the British would have
immense economic and social implications for twentieth-century Bengal.
Bengal was treated as the "breadbasket
of India" and, as the richest province in the empire, was drained of
its resources to maintain the Mughal army. The Mughals, however, did not expend
much energy protecting the countryside or the capital from Arakanse or Portuguese pirates; in one year as many as 40,000 Bengalis were seized by pirates to be
sold as slaves, and still the central government did not intervene. Local
resistance to imperial control forced the emperor to appoint powerful generals
as provincial governors.
Yet, despite the insecurity of the Mughal
regime, Bengal prospered. Agriculture expanded, trade was encouraged, and Dhaka
became one of the centers of the textile trade in South Asia. In 1704 the
provincial capital of Bengal was moved from Dhaka to Murshidabad.
Although they continued to pay tribute to the Mughal court, the governors
became practically independent rulers after the death in 1707 of Aurangzeb,
the last great Mughal emperor.
The governors were strong enough to fend off
marauding Hindu Marathas from the Bombay area during the
eighteenth century. When the Mughal governor Alivardi died in 1756, he
left the rule of Bengal to his grandson Siraj ud Daulah, who would
lose Bengal to the British the following year.
Source: Bangladesh, a country study
Federal Research Division, Library of
Congress
Edited by: James Heitzman and Robert L.
Worden
Research Completed September 1988.
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