Place · Bengal Sultanate capital · India

Gaur (Lakhnauti)

Also known as Bengal Sultanate capital, Gaur ruins, Malda, Gaur, Lakhnauti, Gauda

Function

Authority & administration

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

24.890, 88.160

Worth knowing

Gaur was abandoned after the river shifted and an epidemic in 1575, and its brick was quarried for two centuries to build Murshidabad and the English factories. The Bengal border runs through the site, so part of the city is in India and part in Bangladesh.

Connections (9)

• CampaignVikramashilā

  Vikramashila's destruction is dated to Bakhtiyar Khalji's campaign in Bihar around 1200, the same series of raids that ended Nalanda and Odantapuri. Gaur and Pandua, the Bengal sultanate capitals that grew afterwards, are the successor political centres of the same territory. The monasteries did not simply fall to violence: they depended on Pala royal endowment, and when the dynasty went the institutions had no other source of income.

• Monastic transmissionOdantapuri

  Odantapuri's plan is said to have been the model for Samye, the first monastery in Tibet, and teachers from these Pala foundations — Atisha above all, from Vikramashila — carried their lineages north as the Gangetic institutions failed. Almost nothing of Odantapuri survives above ground; what survives is in Tibet, in the ordination lines, the curriculum and the architecture of monasteries built a thousand kilometres away.

• Site adjacencyAdina Mosque, Pandua

  Gaur and Pandua were the Bengal sultanate's twin capitals, about thirty kilometres apart, occupied alternately as the Ganges shifted and as dynasties changed. The Adina mosque at Pandua, built by Sikandar Shah in 1373, was the largest in the subcontinent — a vast hypostyle hall on the Damascus model, built substantially from stone robbed out of earlier Hindu and Buddhist temples, some of it still carved and visible in the walls.

• CampaignNālandā mahāvihāra

  Bakhtiyar Khalji's campaigns in Bihar around 1200, run from the Bengal base that became Gaur, are the point after which Nālandā ceases to appear in any record as a working institution. Tibetan accounts describe monks fleeing north with manuscripts; the libraries are said to have burned for months. Minhaj-i-Siraj, writing a generation later, describes a fortified place full of shaven-headed men and books, and says the defenders were killed before anyone could read what was there.

• CampaignNarasiṃhadeva I

  Narasimhadeva fought the Bengal sultanate under Tughral Tughan Khan through the 1240s, took Lakhnauti's forces at the Rajmahal pass and raided into south Bengal — the only Indian ruler of the century to carry a war into the sultanate's own territory and hold his own. Konark was begun in the aftermath and is usually read as the monument to it, which means the largest temple in eastern India is a victory over the power that had taken the whole Ganges plain.

• CampaignTalatal Ghar

  The Ahom kingdom's long frontier war was with the Bengal sultanate and then the Mughal subah based at Gaur and Dhaka, running from the 1530s to 1682 through some seventeen campaigns. The Talatal Ghar's subterranean garrison levels and escape tunnels, and the Rang Ghar's fortified capital around them, are what a state builds when it has spent a century and a half being invaded up one river valley and has learned that it will happen again.

• Power passed toThe Ganges' eastward migration

  Gaur stood on a channel of the Ganges and was a city of several square kilometres of brick mosques and gateways. When the main flow moved east to the Padma the river left it, the harbour silted, plague followed, and the capital moved to Rajmahal and then Murshidabad. The Bengal sultanate's principal city is now farmland in Malda, and hydrology rather than conquest emptied it.

• River flowTamralipta / Tamluk

  Tamralipta at the delta's mouth and Gaur two hundred and fifty kilometres upriver were both abandoned by the same westward channel as the Ganges migrated east. One lost its access to the sea and the other its river altogether. The whole western delta becomes a moribund landscape in the same centuries, which is the context for Calcutta being founded on it anyway.

• AnalogueAhmedabad / Karnāvatī / Āshāval

  Ahmedabad and Gaur are the two great sultanate cities of the Indian periphery, built in the same century in the same political situation — a provincial governor turning independent — and in completely different materials. Gujarat had stone and a temple-carving tradition to absorb; Bengal had only brick and terracotta. One is a living city and the other is a field.

On these journeys

• Ghurid conquest & the Delhi Sultanate
• Bengal — sultanate, delta and nawabi
• Ports transformed by rivers, sediment & coastlines
• Cities through time — many civilisations, one place
• Bengal before partition — the delta as one landscape

Sources

Wikipedia, “Gauda (city)”. Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204–1760 (1993); Perween Hasan, Sultans and Mosques (2007).

• Wikipedia — Gauda (city)