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Every student of Indian history knows the Delhi sultanate. Far fewer know that for nearly a century, the sultanate’s most brilliant rival stood not in the Deccan or Bengal but on the Gomti river in eastern Uttar Pradesh, and that its capital earned, from the connoisseurs of the age, the title Shiraz e Hind, the Shiraz of India, a compliment that ranked a Purvanchal river town with the poetry capital of Persia. The Sharqi sultanate of Jaunpur is the great forgotten kingdom of the plain, and its rise and erasure frame the fifteenth century’s story in the east.
The opening was Delhi’s collapse. Timur’s sack of the imperial capital in 1398 shattered the Tughlaq order, and in the wreckage the empire’s eastern viceroy, the eunuch noble Malik Sarwar, titled Malik us Sharq, lord of the east, made himself effectively sovereign at Jaunpur, the fortress city that Firuz Shah Tughlaq had founded on the Gomti a generation earlier in memory of his cousin. Sarwar’s adopted heirs made the independence formal, and the dynasty took from his title its name, the Sharqis, the easterners. At their height they ruled from the borders of Bengal across the whole eastern plain, holding Banaras, Awadh, and at times Bihar, and they besieged Delhi itself more than once, the child of the sultanate grown strong enough to menace the parent.
What distinguished Jaunpur, though, was less its arms than its atmosphere. The Sharqis, Ibrahim Shah above all, whose long reign filled the dynasty’s first half century, made the city a deliberate refuge for the learned of a broken age, welcoming the scholars, sufis, calligraphers, and poets scattered by Timur’s storm, endowing colleges until the city’s madrasas rivalled anything in the Islamic east. It was this concentration of learning that earned the Shiraz title, and the court’s patronage ran across languages and communities, Persian scholarship beside Awadhi poetry, for it was in the Sharqi orbit that the Sufi romance tradition of the eastern tongue flourished, the line that would lead to Jayasi’s Padmavat in the following century.
The dynasty built its own architecture, and it remains the most distinctive regional style of the sultanate era in the north. The Atala Masjid, completed under Ibrahim in 1408 on a grand scale, and the still vaster Jama Masjid of Husain Shah, present a signature found nowhere else, the towering pylon screen, a great arched gateway like a fortress wall thrown across the prayer hall’s face, austere, massive, and unforgettable, a style scholars read as the plain’s own answer to Delhi, built by local craftsmen on local lines. Music completed the court’s refinement, for the last sultan, Husain Shah Sharqi, was himself a composer of rank, remembered in the tradition’s histories as a shaper of the khayal, the form that would come to dominate Hindustani classical music, a genealogy this series revisits in its culture batches.
The end came from a revived Delhi. The Lodi sultans, rebuilding the imperial power the Sharqis had grown up against, broke the eastern kingdom in a generation of wars, Bahlul Lodi defeating Husain Shah and taking Jaunpur in the 1480s, and his son Sikandar Lodi completing the erasure with a conqueror’s thoroughness, demolishing a great share of the Sharqi palaces and monuments, the mosques largely spared, so that the city the traveller sees today is the dynasty’s skeleton, the great pylons standing over a town whose flesh was deliberately removed. Husain Shah died in exile in Bengal, composing to the end, and the east returned to being a province, waiting for the next storm, which would be Babur’s.
Jaunpur’s afterlife kept a certain fragrance of its century. The city remained a seat of scholarship deep into the Mughal era, Shahjahan reportedly calling it the Shiraz of India still, its bridge over the Gomti, the sixteenth century Shahi pul, still carrying its traffic, and its name surviving in the imamas of learning, in perfume and jasmine cultivation, and in the radish of proverbial size that is the district’s humbler fame. For the UP Files, the Sharqi century matters as proof of a recurring pattern, that the eastern plain, so often filed under poverty and crime in the modern imagination, was once the subcontinent’s sanctuary of high culture, and that Purvanchal’s mounds, like Kannauj’s, cover a capital. The region’s later articles in this series, the strongman decades included, should be read with the pylons of the Atala Masjid standing in the background, reminders of how high the same ground once built.
