Kharara

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SUR DYNASTY: SHER SHAH SURI AND THE INTERREGNUM IN MUGHAL INDIA – By Dr. Rahul Kharat Abstract The Sur dynasty, founded by Farid Khan, better known to history as Sher Shah Suri, occupies a curiously paradoxical place in the historiography of medieval India. Though it endured for barely fifteen years (1540–1555) as a ruling house, it interrupted the Mughal Empire at the very moment of its infancy, forcing Humayun into a fifteen-year exile and, in doing so, purchased for North India a brief but remarkably fertile interlude of administrative experimentation. Sher Shah's reforms in revenue assessment, currency, communications, and civil administration did not vanish with his dynasty; they were absorbed, often wholesale, into the statecraft of Akbar and his successors, so that the Sur interregnum can properly be described as the incubator of Mughal governance rather than merely an obstacle to it. This article traces the trajectory of the Sur dynasty from the...