Humayun’s Exile and Return 1544-1555

The fifteen years between 1540 and 1555, during which the second Mughal emperor Humayun was driven from India by the Afghan chief Sher Shah Suri and lived in exile in Sindh, Rajputana, and the Safavid court in Persia, were a formative period in the history of the dynasty. The defeat and expulsion of the Mughals demonstrated how fragile the conquest of 1526 had been; the restoration of 1555, made possible by Safavid military support, would not long survive Humayun’s accidental death six months later, but it laid the foundation for the half-century of Mughal consolidation that followed under Akbar.

The Early Reign

Nasir-ud-din Muhammad Humayun succeeded to the Mughal throne in December 1530, on the death of his father Babur. He was twenty-three years old and had been a witness to, though not a principal actor in, the great campaigns of the previous decade. The political and military situation he inherited was difficult: the Afghan and Rajput polities of North India had not been fully subdued, the political authority of the new dynasty rested on a narrow base of Timurid and Afghan support, and the revenue and administrative structures that Babur had developed were still rudimentary.

The early years of Humayun’s reign were marked by a series of campaigns against the Afghan chiefs of the east and the Rajput polities of the central Ganges plain, as well as by the first attempts to organize the new empire’s administration. The institutional context of these efforts is examined on the Mughal administration overview and the Mughal land revenue systems pages, and the political background is set in the broader account of the Mughal Empire overview.

The Battles with Sher Shah Suri

The decisive conflict of Humayun’s reign was with the Afghan chief Sher Khan, later known as Sher Shah Suri. Sher Khan had been consolidating power in Bihar and Bengal since the early 1530s, and by 1537 he had driven the Mughal governor from Bengal and assumed the title of Sultan. In 1539, at the Battle of Chausa (26 June 1539) on the banks of the Ganges, Humayun’s army was defeated and the emperor narrowly escaped with his life. A second defeat at the Battle of Kannauj (or Bilgram) on 17 May 1540 confirmed the loss of the Mughal position in Hindustan, and Sher Shah assumed effective control of the empire Babur had won. Humayun fled west through Sindh and Rajputana, and for the next three years lived a precarious existence as a refugee.

The Recapture of the Throne 1555

In 1547, Humayun set out from Persia with a small Persian-officered army and regained Kabul. From this base, he spent the next several years consolidating his position in the mountain regions and the Punjab, while the Suri state in Hindustan declined into a series of succession crises. In 1555, taking advantage of the disarray of the Suri court, Humayun marched into Hindustan and defeated the last effective Suri army at Sirhind. The victory gave him the road to Delhi, which he entered without further resistance.

His Death

Humayun did not long enjoy the throne he had recovered. On 20 January 1556, less than six months after his re-entry into Delhi, he died after a fall from the upper storey of his library building in the Purana Qila. The cause of death was variously reported as a stroke, the injuries of the fall, or a combination of the two. The succession passed to his young son Akbar, who was then thirteen years old and was at the time in the Punjab with his guardian Bairam Khan.

The political circumstances of Humayun’s death and the accession of Akbar are examined on the Second Battle of Panipat 1556 and the Akbar the Great pages. The institutional consequences of the early years of Akbar’s reign are treated on the Mughal administration overview and the Mughal court and nobility pages.

Historical Significance

The exile and return of Humayun was the formative event in the history of the early Mughal dynasty. The political vacuum created by his absence allowed the Suri state to demonstrate the viability of an Afghan-ruled North India, and the administrative and revenue innovations of the Suri regime would be adopted, with important modifications, by Akbar’s government. The Persian cultural influences absorbed by Humayun at the Safavid court were also of considerable importance, and they provided a counterweight to the Indian and Central Asian influences that had dominated the court of Babur.

The period of exile was thus a time of both political disaster and cultural preparation. The full arc of the dynasty’s early history is treated in the Mughal Empire overview, and the specific events of the 1550s are examined in the Second Battle of Panipat 1556 and the Afghan Suri dynasty pages.

Sources

• William Erskine, A History of India under the Two First Sovereigns of the House of Taimur, Báber and Humáyun, 2 vols. (Longman, 1854).
• Stephen F. Dale, The Garden of the Eight Paradises (2004), pp. 280–380.