Person · sultan & patron · India
ʿAlāʾuddīn Ḥusain Shāh
The sultan under whom independent Bengal reached its widest extent around 1500, whose administration employed Hindus at the highest level — Rupa and Sanatana Goswami, later Chaitanya's disciples in Vrindavan, were his officers — and whose patronage of Bengali produced the first vernacular renderings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
- Date
- 1494–1519
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 24.867, 88.130
Worth knowing
He is the reason Bengali has a literature: Krittibas's Ramayana and the Mahabharata of Kavindra Parameshvara were written under his house's patronage, in a period when Sanskrit was the only respectable written language. His officers Rupa and Sanatana resigned to follow Chaitanya, which is how the Gaudiya movement acquired its theologians.
About the place
Placed at Gaur, the capital he ruled from and where the mosques and gateways of his reign stand.
Connections (2)
- Patronage networkChaitanya Mahaprabhu
Rupa and Sanatana Goswami were senior officers of Husain Shah's revenue administration — Sanatana as private secretary, Rupa in the treasury — before they resigned, at some personal risk, to follow Chaitanya, who then sent them to Vrindavan to recover the sites of Krishna's life and write the theology. The Gaudiya movement's intellectual apparatus was therefore produced by two Bengali sultanate civil servants, which is not how the tradition usually tells it.
- Patronage networkNabadwīp
Krittibas Ojha's Bengali Ramayana and Kavindra Parameshvara's Mahabharata were both written under the patronage of Husain Shah's house, and Nabadwip's Navya-Nyaya school was working in the same decades a hundred kilometres away. Bengali becomes a written literary language under a Muslim sultanate, at a moment when Sanskrit was the only respectable medium and the Sanskrit logicians up the river were at the height of their prestige.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Alauddin Husain Shah”. Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204–1760 (1993); Perween Hasan, Sultans and Mosques (2007).
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