Raja Ganesha - Reign

Reign

According to Firishta, the reign of Raja Ganesha was marked by his conciliatory policies toward the Muslims in Pandua. He mentioned that, "although Raja Ganesha was not a Muslim, he mixed freely with them and had so much love for them that some Muslims, witnessing to his faith in Islam, wanted to bury him in the Islamic manner." But according to the Riaz, soon after he took over the power in Pandua, he oppressed the Muslims of Bengal and slew a number of them. Thereupon, a Muslim Chishti saint Shaikh Nur Qutb-ul-Alam wrote a letter to the Jaunpur Sultan, Ibrahim Shah Sharqi, with an appeal to invade Bengal. Purport of this letter is found in a letter written by Hazrat Ashraf Jahangir Sinnani, a saint of Jaunpur. According to a tradition, recorded by Mulla Taqyya, a courtier of Akbar and Jahangir, Ibrahim Shah, while proceeding to chastise Raja Ganesha, was opposed by Sivasimha, the ruler of Mithila. Mulla Taqyya gives the date of this event as 805 AH (1402-3), which is obviously wrong but there may be some truth in his statement about the alliance of Sivasimha with Raja Ganesha.

According to the narrative given in the Riaz, when Ibrahim Shah reached Bengal with his army, Ganesha asked saint Shaikh Nur Qutb-ul-Alam for his forgiveness and protetion. The saint agreed and Jadu, the twelve-year-old son of Ganesha, was converted to Islam by him and renamed Jalaluddin. He was placed on the throne under the title Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah. Sultan Ibrahim returned to Jaunpur. Ganesha ascended the throne immediately after the return of Ibrahim Shah for the second time. But this time, he was killed by some servants of his son, who re-occupied the throne after his death.

The earlier accounts of the invasion of Ibrahim Shah Sharqi are different from the account given in the Riaz. A Chinese source mentioned that a kingdom to the west of Bengal had indeed invaded, but desisted when placated with gold and money. Abd-ur Razzaq Samarqandi, in his Maṭla'-us-Sadain wa Majma'-ul-Bahrain mentioned that in 1442, a diplomat in the service of Shah Rukh, the Timurid ruler of Herat (reigned 1405–47), wrote that his master had intervened in the Bengal-Jaunpur crisis at the request of the sultan of Bengal, "directing the ruler of Jaunpur to abstain from attacking the King of Bengal, or to take the consequences upon himself. To which intimidation the ruler of Jaunpur was obedient, and resisted from his attacks upon Bengal". A contemporary Arakanese tradition recorded that the army of Raja Ganesha, then firmly in control of Pandua, had defeated Ibrahim in battle. According to this tradition, one of the rulers of Arakan, who had been given refuge in Pandua after having been defeated by a Burman monarch in 1406, gave Raja Ganesha the military advice that enabled his army to defeat Ibrahim .