Place · battle · India
Chausa
The 26 June 1539 battle at Chausa in Buxar district, Bihar, on the Ganga, where the Afghan noble Sher Shah Suri defeated and nearly captured the Mughal emperor Humayun — Humayun escaped by swimming the river. The following year's Battle of Kannauj (May 1540) completed Sher Shah's rout and drove Humayun to Persia and Kabul for fifteen years. Sher Shah's five-year reign (1540-1545) rebuilt the Grand Trunk Road from Chittagong to Kabul, introduced the standardised silver rupee (still the basis of the Indian currency unit), reformed the revenue system around measured land assessment, and established the postal relay system the Mughals inherited. Sher Shah died at Kalinjar in 1545 and his son Islam Shah followed him; Humayun returned and reconquered Delhi in 1555.
- Date
- 1539–40 CE
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.520, 84.050
Connections (4)
- Power passed toSasaram
Sher Shah Suri beat Humayun at Chausa in 1539 and Kannauj in 1540 and drove him out of India for fifteen years, and in five years of rule produced the Bengal-to-Indus highway with its sarais, the silver rupiya and a revenue survey based on measured yield — all of which the Mughals took over wholesale when they came back. His own tomb rises on an island in a tank at Sasaram, on the road he built and near the country he came from.
- Succession in timePanipat
Sher Shah drove Humayun out at Chausa and Kannauj in 1539 and 1540, ruled five years and died besieging a fort; the Sur state fell apart within a decade in disputed successions, and Humayun walked back in almost unopposed in 1555. Akbar then had to fight the second Panipat in 1556 against Hemu, a Hindu general of the Suri establishment who had briefly taken Delhi — the Mughal empire's second founding, thirty years after the first.
- Power passed toIndraprastha / Purana Qila
Humayun founded Dinpanah on the Yamuna in 1533 as the seat of a dynasty he then lost; Sher Shah took it after Chausa and Kannauj, renamed it Shergarh and built the Qila-i-Kuhna mosque inside. The same walls carry the buildings of the house that was driven out and the house that drove it out, seven years apart.
- Lost battle atHumayun
Sher Shah Suri beat Humayun at Chausa in 1539 and at Kannauj in 1540, driving him out of India for fifteen years during which the Suri dynasty ran the subcontinent, built the Grand Trunk Road and reformed the currency and revenue systems that the Mughals subsequently inherited. Humayun crossed into Persia and spent his exile at Shah Tahmasp's court at Qazvin before recovering Delhi in 1555 with Persian military support, six months before his accidental death.
On these journeys
Sources
List of wars in the Indian subcontinent; standard reference accounts
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