Seven Successions, One Ordinary One
Between 1704 and 1765 the masnad — the cushion of state — at Murshidabad changed hands eight times among people counted as Nawab-Nazim of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa: Murshid Quli Khan founded the line by appointment, and seven successions followed him. Reading each one off the pages of the Riyazu-s-Salatin, the Persian chronicle of Bengal compiled by Ghulam Husain Salim and translated with extensive footnotes by Maulavi Abdus Salam between 1902 and 1904, produces an unexpectedly clean count. Only one of those seven — Sarfaraz Khan's accession in 1739, 'agreeably to the dying instructions of his father' — was an uncontested son inheriting a father's throne [6]. Of the rest: one was an imperial patent overriding a grandson who had already succeeded by default; one was a minister's armed coup that killed the ruler it replaced; one was a lifetime designation that still had to be defended against rival kin; and the last three in unbroken succession were installations by a European trading company's council and its army. This is the shape the archive's own chain records as bare 'inheritance' four times over — a tag this essay's sources do not support in three of those four cases (see dateNotes).
A Revenue Officer Becomes a Dynast, 1704
Murshid Quli Khan did not begin as a claimant to a throne. Born a Brahmin named Surya Narayan Mishra in the Deccan around 1670, he was sold at about ten years old to a Persian named Haji Shafi, who converted him to Islam, and was later noticed by Aurangzeb, who appointed him Diwan of Bengal around 1700 [14]. The Riyazu-s-Salatin frames what followed as a favour granted rather than a right claimed: 'proving his good and faithful services, the Khan became the recipient of further Imperial favours, and was appointed by the Emperor Deputy to the Prince in the Nizamat of the Subah of Bengal and Orissa, in addition to the office of Diwan. He was also given the title of Murshid Quli Khan' [1]. On reaching the province, he distributed its deputy offices among his own family, appointing 'Shujau-d-din Muhammad Khan, his son-in-law, to be his Deputy Diwan in Odisa' [1] — the marriage alliance that would carry the throne to a second family within his own lifetime, and the archive's own basis for dating the polity's founding to 1704.
A Son Who Ceded to His Father, 1725–27
Murshid Quli Khan had no surviving son, so on his death the masnad passed first to his grandson Sarfaraz Khan [14]. But Sarfaraz's own father, Shuja-ud-din Khan, then governor of Orissa, had no intention of watching his son hold what he believed should be his: on hearing the news he is recorded to have said, 'The sky has turned towards the fulfilment of my aim, and has minted coins of the kingdom after my name' [3], and marched on Bengal while his agents lobbied the Mughal court to have the province's patent issued in his own name rather than his son's. It worked — the imperial grandee overseeing Bengal's affairs, 'misled by the intrigues of the aforesaid agent, sent the patent and Khilat of the Deputy Nizamat of Bengal in the name of Shujau-d-din Muhammad Khan' [3]. Sarfaraz, still young, prepared to fight his own father for the throne, until his grandmother — Murshid Quli Khan's widow — talked him out of it: 'Your father is old; after him, the Subahdari as well as the country with its treasures would devolve on you. To fight against one's own father, is cause of loss both in this world and in the next' [4]. Sarfaraz yielded the fort to his father without a battle and retired to a private estate to wait his turn [4] — a peaceful transfer, but one settled by an imperial patent overruling a dying man's own choice of heir, not by any right of birth.
The One Clean Inheritance, and the Coup That Followed It, 1739–40
When Shuja-ud-din died in turn, Sarfaraz Khan finally inherited outright and without contest: the chronicle records only that 'Nawab Sarfaraz Khan mounted the masnad of the Nizamat of Bengal, agreeably to the dying instructions of his father' [6] — the sole succession in this house's history that passed from father to son by plain inheritance, unforced. It did not survive a year. Sarfaraz appointed Haji Ahmad, the Rai Raian and the banker Jagat Seth as his own councillors on taking the throne [6], and it was they — the 'Triumvirate Council' — who plotted 'to call in Ali Vardi Khan with his army from Azimabad under pretext of visiting the Nazim, and then to instal him on the masnad of the Nizamat in supercession of Sarfaraz Khan' [7]. Alivardi Khan, deputy governor of Bihar at Patna and the younger brother of Haji Ahmad, marched on Murshidabad in 1740 and defeated Sarfaraz's forces there [15]. Sarfaraz fought on elephant-back to the end, until, as the chronicle records, 'he himself was hit on the forehead by the bullet of a gun shot by a traitor from his own camp, and was felled on his elephant-litter, and the bird of his soul flew to Heaven' [8]. A modern summary states plainly what the chronicle circles around: Alivardi 'toppled the Nasiri dynasty of Nawabs by defeating Sarfaraz Khan in 1740 and assumed power himself' in what it calls his 'usurpation of power', legitimised by a Mughal patent obtained only afterward [15]. The one clean inheritance this house ever produced was answered, within months, by the one outright regicide.
A Designated Heir Fights His Own Family, 1756
Alivardi ruled sixteen years and, unlike Sarfaraz Khan, whose throne he had taken, fixed the succession before he died: he named his own grandson Siraj-ud-Daulah heir-apparent and, in the chronicle's words, 'in his life-time placed on the cushion of the Nizamat', with the whole court already paying him homage [9]. It was the most secure transfer this house ever arranged — tested and confirmed while the incumbent still lived — and it still had to be defended after Alivardi's death. Siraj's army nonetheless moved against his own aunt, Ghaseti Begum, capturing her and 'rased to the ground her buildings and her palace, and unearthing her buried treasures carried them to Mansurganj' [9]. Designation by a dying ruler had settled who would sit on the masnad; it had not settled whether the rest of the family would accept it unopposed.
Three Installations in a Row, 1757–1765
Siraj's own fall, a year later, was — like Alivardi's own coup seventeen years before — a succession decided entirely outside the family, and this time by a power outside Bengal altogether. His commander-in-chief, Mir Jafar, secretly agreed with the East India Company's Robert Clive to hold his division out of the coming battle in exchange for the throne itself [16]. At Plassey on 23 June 1757 [16], Clive had 'already flung himself into the conspiracy headed by Mir Jafar, to dethrone Siraju-d-daulah' before the armies even met [10]; in the fighting, Mir Jafar's troops 'stood at a distance towards the left from the main army' and never engaged. Mir Jafar 'entered the citadel, struck up the music announcing his accession to the masnad of Bengal' the same night Siraj fled [11], and Siraj, captured within days, was killed on Mir Jafar's order 'with the advice of the English Chiefs, and on the importunity and insistence of Jagat Set' [11] — a throne changing hands not by blood, marriage or a minister's private coup, but by a foreign trading company's army standing, or refusing to stand, on a field. It set the pattern for what followed. Three years later, with Mir Jafar judged by the Company an incapable ruler, Calcutta's governor engineered his replacement by his own son-in-law [17]: 'with the help of the English Council in Calcutta, Mir Qasim now became Nazim of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, in supercession of Mir Jafar, who had proved himself an incapable ruler' [12], while the deposed Nawab 'came to Calcutta and remained there under surveillance' [12]. Mir Qasim fell out with the Company in turn, lost at Buxar, and died in obscurity and abject poverty near Delhi [17]; the English restored Mir Jafar a second time, splitting Bengal's revenue between Nawab and Company — 'ten annas of the revenue of the Provinces were allotted to the English for their service as Diwan, whilst six annas of the same were held by Nawab Jafar Ali Khan' [13] — until Mir Jafar's death in 1765 cleared the way for the formal settlement: Shah Alam II's grant of the Diwani at Allahabad that August, which handed the Company the right to collect Bengal, Bihar and Orissa's revenue directly [18]. Titular Nawabs continued at Murshidabad afterward.
Dates in this essay
The archive dates this polity 1704–1765, from Murshid Quli Khan's appointment as diwan/governor of Bengal under Aurangzeb to the 1765 grant of the Diwani that transferred Bengal's revenue and administration to the East India Company — the settlement that ended the Nawab-Nazims as a sovereign actor, even though titular Nawabs continued at Murshidabad afterward. This essay's own sources confirm the mechanism: the Riyazu-s-Salatin gives the exact fiscal split that marked the change — 'ten annas of the revenue of the Provinces were allotted to the English for their service as Diwan, whilst six annas of the same were held by Nawab Jafar Ali Khan' [13] — and the Treaty of Allahabad's own terms, that Shah Alam II 'granted the East India Company Diwani rights... to collect taxes on behalf of the Emperor' [18]. Plassey (1757) is recorded here as the year occupancy of the throne changed (Mir Jafar for Siraj-ud-Daulah), not the year sovereignty did.
A date this essay could not settle: Bosworth's genealogical table (the register's source) gives 1725 for Shuja-ud-din's accession, implying Murshid Quli Khan died that year. But the Riyazu-s-Salatin's own chronology gives his death as 1139 A.H. [2] — 1726–27 by standard conversion — and Wikipedia's biographical entry gives 30 June 1727 [14]. This essay follows the register's 1725/1704 framing for consistency with the rest of the archive's chain, but the two-year gap between the register's source and this essay's own primary and secondary sources is unresolved and flagged here for whoever next revises `houses.js` for this house.
The register's chain tags four of this house's seven successions (Shuja-ud-din 1725, Alivardi 1740, Siraj-ud-Daulah 1756, Mir Qasim 1760) with the mode 'inheritance', each carrying the note that 'Bosworth gives filiation only; the manner of accession is not on this page.' The manner this essay found on the Riyazu-s-Salatin's own pages is not filiation in three of those four cases: Shuja-ud-din obtained an imperial patent that overrode his son's prior claim [3]; Alivardi's accession was a coup that killed his predecessor [8]; and Mir Qasim's was an installation by the East India Company that deposed his father-in-law [17] for incompetence [12]. Only Siraj-ud-Daulah's 1756 accession was genuinely inheritance-like, and even that was a lifetime designation rather than a death-triggered succession. This is recorded here as a correction the register's mode field should eventually carry, not as a silent disagreement with it.
Where authorities disagree about when a state began or ended, the archive follows one rule — a polity is dated from the assumption of sovereign power in its own capital, and to the settlement that extinguished it — and records the alternatives rather than hiding them.
Open questions
Whether Murshid Quli Khan died in 1725 (Bosworth's table, the figure the register's chain currently uses) or 1727 (the Riyazu-s-Salatin's own 1139 A.H., and Wikipedia's biographical entry) is not resolved here; see dateNotes.
How much of the Riyazu-s-Salatin's sympathetic portrait of Sarfaraz Khan as an 'ideally noble and mild prince' undone only by 'faithless' councillors is the chronicler's own moral framing rather than an independently checkable fact — the translator's footnotes editorialise heavily on this point and this essay has not weighed them against an outside source.
Mir Qasim's own parentage is not given in either passage opened for this essay; the Riyazu-s-Salatin and Wikipedia would need to be read further to settle it.
Whether Mir Habib's documented grudge against Alivardi Khan — for displacing his old patron Murshid Quli Khan (II) from Orissa's governorship — was a genuine motive for his later alliance with the Marathas against Bengal, or a retrospective explanation supplied by an unsympathetic chronicler, is not established by the sources opened here.