Glorification of Sher Shah

Sher Shah Suri, "The Tiger King", founder of the Suri Dynasty, was born at Narnaul in Punjab in 1486 and died on May 22, 1545 at Kalinjar. His original name was Farid Khan. His father Hasan was a Jagirdar at Sasaram, Bihar . Ill-treated by his stepmother, he left home at an early age. He went to Jaunpur where he set himself to serious study and there he acquired good command over the Arabic and Persian languages. Because of his abilities, he was soon appointed by his father to manage the family Jagir at Sasaram. [1]

Farid Khan exploited this opportunity to accumulate riches by highway robbery and plundering the wealth and riches of the Hindus, taking their women and children as captives and selling them as slaves, following the foot steps of Bakhiyar Khalji, the famoue warlord of Bihar , who lived in early 13th century AD. In one occasion, Farid succeeded to kill a tiger and hence earned the title "Sher (tiger) Khan". The money that Sher Khan accumulated by Criminal means helped him raise a small army and hence to begin his political career. Later on,  Sher Khan could consolidate his power by gaining  the possession of the Chunar Fort by marrying the widow of Taj Khan Sarang-Khani, the Governer of  Ibrahim Lodi.

It may be mentioned here that Chunar is in the Mirzapur District of Uttar Pradesh state, India. Though a small town, Chunar has a great influence in Indian history. The Chunar Fort was built by Maharaja Vikramaditya, the King of Ujjain, in honour of the stay of his brother Raja Bhrithari. As per Hindu records, Chunar is the corrupt of Sanskrit Charanadri as Lord Vishnu had taken his first step here in his Vaman incarnation. The place was also well known as Nainagarh.

However, Sher Khan gained considerable strength after defeating the combined army of Bengal and Hamayun with his own Bihari army and some Pashtun tribes men, in 1537. Then he defeated Humayun at the Battle of Kanauj on May 17, 1540, and ascended the throne of Delhi with the title Sher Shah. His reign barely spanned five years, but the so called secular historians of India , who are not prepared to miss even a single opportunity to glorify the Muslim invaders, portray it as a landmark in the history of the Sub-continent. They project Sher Shah as a rare genius and say that he made many brilliant additions and improvements to the existing system of administration. [2]

They narrate Sher shah as an outstanding military genius, a great civilian administrator and, according to them; he left not even a single area of administrative syatem where he had not set up reforms. But to an unbiased reader, all such narrations appear to be nothing but cock-and-bull stories. According to these spineless slave historians, Sher Shah had revolutionized the revenue syatem which Akbar later on copied. But according another group of historians, Todar Mal, a Rajput minister of Akbar's court, had implemented all such reforms connected to revenue administration, which are now being wrongly attributed to Sher Shah. [2]

Last update : 26-07-2009 20:01

Keywords : Distortion of Indian History for Muslim Appeasement: Part 4, Radhasyam Brahmachari

Average user rating

   (0 vote)