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AUGUST, 1922]
A NEW VIEW OF SHER SHAH SUR.
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too much of the subject of dealing with his people to require their guidance. The defect of these remarkable qualities was the natural tendency to concentrate all authority in himself, with the inevitable consequence of the apparent disappearance of his system on his death and the destruction of the short-lived Dynasty he founded, largely owing to the enmity his autocratic methods roused in his opponents on their succeeding to the Empire he created. But what they could not altogether destroy was the system itself; he had applied it on too large a scale for that. So the good he did for his people survived him, and much of it remains still. As a ruler in India he is therefore in some senses unique. I propose now to outline his career from the information provided by Professor Qanungo's researches for the benefit of myself and others who may perhaps desire to carry on the study of a man well worth studying by all who would understand modern India.
Farid (afterwards the great Sher Shah), the eldest son of Hasan, was the grandson of Ibrâhîm of the Sûr section of the Mâti clan of Afghâns from Surgurgai, "a detached ridge of the Takht-i-Sulaiman mountains on the southern bank of the upper course of the Gâmal river" on "one of the oldest and most frequented trade-routes between Southern Afghânistân and the Indus Valley". Ibrâhîm Sûr was almost naturally in such circumstances a horse-dealer, like very many of his countrymen before and since. In the reign of the Afghân Bahlôl Lodi (1451-1488) Ibrâhîm migrated to Bijwârâ in the Jalandhar Doâb (Panjab) to the fief of Mahâbat Khân Sûr of the Dâûd Shâh khel (sept), and entered the service of Jamâl Khân Sârangkhânî as a soldier at Hissâr Firôza (Delhi District). He finally obtained for himself a fief in Nârnol "to maintain 40 horsemen," and there he settled and died. His son Hasan Sûr was confirmed in the fief and there were born his eight sons, of whom four came into history, viz., Farid (Sher Shah) and Nizâm, sons of the "first" wife, and Sulaimân and Ahmad, sons of a slave-girl raised to the status of a wife. Farid was born somewhere about 1486 or perhaps earlier, as Mr. Qanungo's authorities seem to be doubtful here (see pp. 3 and 344), and the date will probably never be fixed exactly.
Farid, like Sivaji, was reared in his early days in a hard school, and for the same reason -the practical desertion of an older legitimate wife and her children in favour of a younger woman and her progeny. In both cases the situation did much to mould character. However badly Hasan Sûr treated Farid and his mother, he was a capable man, and when Jamâl Khân Sârangkhânî was transferred to the Eastern Provinces, he took Hasan with him and 'conferred on him Sâsarâm and Khawâspûr (in the Shâhâbâd district of Bihår) in fief and promoted him to the command of 500. This fief afterwards played a great part in Farid's life.
Farid, annoyed at the continual ill-treatment of himself and his mother, went in 1501 to Jamal Khân Sârangkhânî at Jaunpur. This was a turning point in his career. He was then about fifteen, and like Napoleon, he became at that age a deep and earnest literary student in a curiously similar manner. He began at that time, and continued for the next ten years, to study civil administration, so that he acquired" a first hand knowledge of revenue affairs, the distress of the cultivators, the oppression of the Muslim soldiery and the corruption of the Hindu revenue-collectors:" a knowledge that not only secured for him a high reputation among his kinsfolk but stood him in good stead when he became powerful, colouring his whole life. It also reconciled him to his father. Farid at this period was about twenty-five.
We now have clearly before us the makings of a great ruler. Capable scion of a middleclass military family rising to local importance, brought up in a hard school, self-trained to scholarship and civil administration, and known personally to the great political men of his time.
