History of Sylhet: from Srihatta to the Londoni era

Copper plates, Shahjalal's arrival in 1303, lime and tea under the British, Sylheti seafarers and the 1947 vote: how Sylhet's past shaped it.

Sylhet's past is written on copper plates turned up by ploughs, carved over shrine gateways and carried by families who keep one foot in a village on the Surma and the other in east London. For most of its history the region was a frontier: between the Bengal plains and the hills of Meghalaya and Assam, between kingdoms that left Sanskrit inscriptions and hill peoples who raised standing stones, and later between British Bengal and British Assam.

This chapter runs from the earliest records to the present and keeps two things apart: what inscriptions and documents show, and what tradition holds. Both matter in a place where a 14th-century saint's shrine still draws visitors every day and the 1947 referendum still shapes family memory.

Rivers, hills and a frontier valley

Start with the map. The Barak river comes down from the Manipur hills and splits at the Bangladesh border into the Surma, which flows past Sylhet city, and the Kushiyara to the south. They rejoin far downstream in Kishoreganj, above Bhairab Bazar, to form the Meghna. Between them lies a low basin that floods for months each year, broken by deep seasonal wetlands called haors.

To the north rise the Khasi and Jaintia hills, now the Indian state of Meghalaya, whose streams feed the Surma; to the east lies the Barak valley of Assam. The hills held what the plains lacked, limestone, timber and elephants, and later slopes for tea, and boats carried their goods downstream. A 10th-century copper plate already mentions a boat anchorage in Srihatta.

That position explains much of what follows: a hill kingdom on the northern edge that lasted until 1835, British traders drawn to the limestone, the move into Assam in 1874, and young men who found their way to the ships at Calcutta.

Srihatta: copper plates and early kingdoms

The names

The old name was Srihatta, also found as Shilhatta. Most writers read the second half as hatta, a market, the root of the Bangla haat; explanations of the first half differ. After 1303 the town was renamed Jalalabad after Shahjalal, a name still used by local newspapers and institutions, while everyday speech kept Sylhet.

What the copper plates say

Early history rests mainly on copper plates, royal land grants engraved on metal. The oldest, the 7th-century Nidhanpur grant, was found by a cultivator in 1912 in today's Beanibazar upazila. Issued by Bhaskaravarman, king of Kamarupa in present-day Assam, it renews a lost earlier grant to more than 200 Vedic Brahmins of 56 gotras.

The Paschimbhag plate, found in 1958 in Rajnagar upazila of Moulvibazar, was issued around 935 by Srichandra of the Chandra dynasty of south-eastern Bengal. It grants land in Srihatta to Brahmins and nine monasteries; the largest, Chandrapur matha, supported a teacher and students, which is why historians speak of a centre of higher learning here a thousand years ago. It also records the Chandra kings' campaigns towards Kamarupa. Since 2017 it has hung in the Bhashasainik Matin Uddin Ahmed Museum in Sylhet city.

Other plates, such as a grant of Raja Marundanatha found at Kalapur near Sreemangal, continue the record of a plain ruled in turn from Kamarupa, by Harikela and the Chandra kings, and then by small local dynasties.

Gour, Laur and the Jaintia kingdom

By the 13th century the region was split among small kingdoms: Gour around today's Sylhet city, Laur, and Brahmachal in the south around Moulvibazar. Their stories come mostly from later chronicles and family traditions, so details need caution. In the usual outline King Govardhan of Gour was killed in 1260 fighting rebels and the Jaintia kingdom, and his nephew Gour Govinda reunited Gour and Brahmachal. Banglapedia treats Gour Govinda, the king defeated in 1303, as a historical figure.

North of them the Jaintia kingdom held both hills and plain. Its plains capital was Jaintiapur, at the foot of the hills about 40 km north of Sylhet city, where Banglapedia dates Khasi rule to around 1500, through a marriage alliance. The palace built by Lakshmi Singh in 1680 is now a ruin; the nearby Jainteswari temple keeps a wall with plaster reliefs of horses, lions and winged figures.

Another kind of record stands in stone. Jaintiapur has some 25 upright menhirs and 32 table-like dolmens in three groups: by the Jainteswari temple near the bus stop on the Jaflong road, about 1.5 km north-west by the Nayagang river, and in a Khasi village about 1 km south-east. They belong to the megalith tradition of the Khasi hills, but no excavation at Jaintiapur has dated them, so treat any precise age with care. See Jaintiapur Rajbari and megaliths.

The megaliths stand beside the main road through Jaintiapur bazar, an easy half-hour stop on the way to Jaflong or Lalakhal. Please do not climb or sit on the stones.

1303: the conquest and Shahjalal

The most reliable evidence dates the conquest to 703 AH, or 1303, under Sultan Shamsuddin Firuz Shah of Bengal. Its oldest record is an inscription of 1512, from Alauddin Husain Shah's reign: two centuries after the event, but considered accurate in its dates. It names the first conqueror as Sikandar Khan Ghazi and is dedicated to Shaikh Jalal Mujarrad, the celibate.

Tradition fills in the rest. It holds that Burhanuddin, a Muslim of Tultikar, sacrificed a cow for his son's birth, and that Gour Govinda had the child killed and the father's hand cut off; Banglapedia classes this as a folk tale. In the folk account Sikandar Khan Ghazi was beaten back twice before the sultan sent his commander Nasiruddin, and the Sufi Shahjalal joined the campaign with his followers. Gour Govinda fled.

Sikandar Khan Ghazi became the first Muslim governor and later drowned in a boat accident. Syed Nasiruddin went on to found a principality at Taraf, in today's Habiganj. Shahjalal, by tradition, shared the land among his companions and let them marry, while he stayed single.

Who was Shahjalal

His origin is disputed. Banglapedia rejects a 19th-century claim that he came from Yemen; an inscription found in Sylhet in 1873 calls him Kuniyayi, linking him to Kuniya in Turkey. The Persian Gulzar-i-Abrar says 360 of his 700 companions reached Bengal, the source of the famous 360 saints, a figure that belongs to tradition and cannot be checked.

Ibn Battuta's visit

The best outside witness is the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who came in 1345 or 1346 and spent three days at the saint's lodge. He described a tall, thin, old dervish who fasted most days and prayed through the night, though he called him Jalaluddin Tabrizi, which scholars see as a confusion with an earlier saint. The companions said their master was about 150 and had foretold his death; recent studies place it in 1347.

The grave at the Shahjalal dargah is unusually long, which devotees link to Ibn Battuta's tall dervish. Beliefs such as the descent of the shrine's jalali pigeons from a pair given by Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi belong to devotional life, not the documented record. See Shrines, temples and sacred sites.

Sultans and Mughals

For two centuries Sylhet was a frontier district of the Bengal Sultanate, part of Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah's united sultanate by 1352. Governors came and went: Khurshid Khan built a mosque at Hatkhola in 1463, and Rukn Khan enlarged Shahjalal's shrine in 1512. Local chiefs sometimes broke away: Pratapgarh declared its independence in 1489, and its later ruler Bazid took the title of sultan and seized Sylhet town until Surwar Khan, a minister of Alauddin Husain Shah, defeated him.

The Mughals came late. Afghan chiefs and local landholders held out in the hills and marshes until Islam Khan's campaign of 1612. Under the Mughals Sylhet was a sarkar, or revenue district, of eight mahals, among them Jaintia, Laur and Baniachong, run by faujdars, military governors. One of them, Lutfullah Shirazi, built an enclosure at Shahjalal's shrine in 1660.

The best-known Mughal monument is the Shahi Eidgah, an open-air prayer ground on a hillock near the Shahjalal dargah, usually credited to the faujdar Farhad Khan in Aurangzeb's time, though sources differ on the date. Steps climb to a long prayer wall with a large mihrab and a row of small domes, and on Eid mornings up to 100,000 people pray here.

What Sylhet traded

The Ain-i-Akbari, Akbar's great survey compiled around 1590, notes Sylhet for oranges, timber, singing birds and also slaves, a dark part of the record. Nearly two centuries later the British collector Robert Lindsay made his fortune in elephants and limestone.

The old trade most alive today is agarwood, the resin-darkened aloe wood distilled into attar. Cultivation around Barlekha in Moulvibazar is said to be some 400 years old, and before 1947 the Sujanagar area alone had about 300 small distilleries. The weaving of shital pati, the cool mat made from murta cane, mostly by women in low-lying villages, joined UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage in 2017. More on crafts is in People, languages and culture.

Company rule: limestone, revolt and the Jaintia annexation

In 1765 the East India Company took the diwani, the right to collect Bengal's revenue, and Sylhet came under British administration. Its best-remembered early official, Robert Lindsay, arrived as resident collector in 1778 and soon made a private fortune trading in elephants and limestone from the hills, a double role as trader and ruler that bred resentment.

In 1781 a flood ruined the crops, and in the famine that followed nearly a third of the people died, according to W. W. Hunter's later account. In 1782, during Muharram, a rising led by Syed Muhammad Hadi and Syed Muhammad Mahdi gathered at the Shahi Eidgah. Lindsay arrived with armed men; in the fight Hadi was shot dead, by Lindsay himself according to the accounts, and Mahdi was killed too. Some writers count it among the first risings against British rule in the subcontinent.

Lindsay's memoir adds a coda: years later in Britain a Sylheti came to avenge the rising's leader, made peace with him instead and cooked him a curry. The story may be polished, but it is an early glimpse of a Sylheti in Britain.

The hills and the border

The frontier with the hill peoples was often violent. Khasi raiders burned Laur in 1744, raids struck Laur and Pandua between 1783 and 1789, and a first British expedition entered Jaintia in 1774.

Jaintia's independence ended in the 1830s. British records state that in 1832 Jaintia men seized four British subjects, three of whom were reportedly sacrificed, and that the raja would not act. In 1835 the Company annexed the Jaintia plains to Sylhet district. The account comes from the annexing side, but the result is not in doubt.

The old line between plain and hill is now largely the border with Meghalaya, running along the foot of the hills just north of Jaflong and Lalakhal, whose water and stone come down from the Indian side. See Jaflong and the northern hills.

Assam, tea and a growing town

Sylhet town became a municipality in 1867. In 1874, despite protests from Hindu and Muslim leaders, the British moved the district out of Bengal into the new Chief Commissioner's province of Assam. Apart from 1905 to 1911, under the short-lived province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, it stayed with Assam until 1947, which is why its fate at partition was decided separately.

In the 1890s the Assam Bengal Railway linked the Surma valley with the port of Chittagong, though the branch line into Sylhet town opened only between 1912 and 1915. In 1892 the zamindar Raja Girish Chandra Roy raised a school he had founded in 1886 into Murari Chand College, named after his maternal grandfather; classes began on 27 June 1892. The 1897 Assam earthquake, which caused deaths and wide damage across Sylhet, brought down the college building, and Roy rebuilt it. The present hill campus at Thackeray Tila in Tilagarh opened on 27 July 1925.

The two riverside landmarks every visitor sees date from this era. Ali Amjad's clock was built by Nawab Ali Ahmad Khan in the 1870s (sources give 1872 or 1874) and named after his son; it is often called the oldest clock tower in Bangladesh. Beside it, Keane Bridge opened in 1936, named after Sir Michael Keane, governor of Assam from 1932 to 1937. Badly damaged by Pakistani dynamite in 1971, the iron bridge has been closed to cars since 2019 and now serves mainly people on foot, though the rules for rickshaws and motorbikes have changed more than once.

Tea and the people who made it

Tea changed the face of the hills. Banglapedia dates the first tea garden in today's Bangladesh to 1854 at Malnichhara, now within Sylhet city; other accounts say 1849 or 1857. More gardens followed from 1860, by 1900 Sylhet had more than 71,000 acres under tea, and in 1904 to 1905, 110 of its 123 estates were European-owned.

Recruiters brought indentured workers from Chota Nagpur, Bihar, Odisha and elsewhere in India, often on false promises, and housed them in labour lines where many descendants still live. In May 1921 around 30,000 workers left the gardens under the cry Mulluk Cholo, roughly 'let us go home', and made for the steamer ghat at Chandpur; police opened fire there and many were killed. Tea workers mark 20 May in their memory, though as of 2021 the government had not recognised it as a national day.

By 2010, Banglapedia records, 135 of the country's 162 tea gardens were in Sylhet division. See The tea gardens, Malnichhara and the Sreemangal tea gardens.

Lascars, Londonis and the road to Brick Lane

Sylhet is far from the sea, yet the first Sylhetis to settle in Britain came as sailors. From the East India Company's day, British ships were crewed partly by Indian seamen called lascars, most of them Bengali Muslims or Punjabi Sikhs, and young Sylhetis went to Calcutta in search of a berth. Serangs, the crew bosses, recruited from their own villages, sometimes 40 men from one village onto one ship. When the First World War began, 51,616 lascars were working on British ships.

Some left their ships in British ports and stayed; Sylheti restaurant workers are recorded in London from at least 1873. Ayub Ali Master, who ran the Shah Jolal café in the East End and helped stranded seamen, and Shah Abdul Majid Qureshi, who said he opened Britain's first Sylheti-run restaurant, the Dilkush in Soho, founded the Indian Seamen's Welfare League in 1943.

Large-scale migration came after the Second World War, to industrial towns such as Birmingham, Oldham, Manchester and Bradford and to Tower Hamlets in London, and families followed in large numbers from the 1970s. By 1970 Brick Lane was largely Bengali; in 1976 a former synagogue on Fournier Street became the Jamme Masjid; and after the racist murder of 25-year-old Altab Ali on 4 May 1978, more than 7,000 people marched behind his coffin. As industry shed jobs in the late 1970s many Sylhetis opened restaurants, and in 2001 the local ward was renamed Spitalfields and Banglatown.

A majority of British Bangladeshis trace their roots to the Sylhet region, and at home anyone with a life in Britain is a Londoni. The link shows in household finances: Banglapedia lists rent and remittances as the main income of about one household in ten in Sylhet district. See People, languages and culture and, if your family is from Sylhet, Visiting from abroad.

Partition, language and liberation

The 1947 referendum

Because Sylhet belonged to Assam rather than Bengal, the 1947 partition plan gave it a referendum of its own. On 6 and 7 July 1947, of 546,815 registered voters, 239,619 chose East Bengal, and so Pakistan, and 184,041 chose Assam, and so India, a margin of 55,578. The Indian Independence Act of 18 July 1947 acknowledged the result.

The boundary award of Sir Cyril Radcliffe, made public in August 1947, then gave India most of the Karimganj subdivision, including some Muslim-majority thanas. The new border cut through a district that had worked as one, and for many families the referendum and the Karimganj award remain living memories on both sides.

The language question

Sylhet joined the movement for Bangla as a state language from its start. In 1948 a group of Sylhet women led by Zobeda Khanom Chowdhury met a minister and handed a memorandum to the head of the East Bengal government asking for recognition of Bengali; when an Urdu-language paper attacked them, others in Sylhet, among them Syeda Najibunnesa Khatun, protested. The movement's climax came in Dhaka on 21 February 1952.

1971

In the Liberation War of 1971 the Sylhet region lay in Sectors 3, 4 and 5, and the commander-in-chief of the Bangladesh forces was a Sylheti. M. A. G. Osmani, born in Sunamganj on 1 September 1918, came from a family of Dayamir, now in Osmani Nagar upazila. A retired colonel of the British Indian and Pakistan armies, he became commander-in-chief when the Bangladesh government was formed on 17 April 1971.

Fighting began early. Banglapedia records a clash in the city's hospital area on 4 April 1971 and, on 5 April, an attack on the airport while fighters freed about 2,500 prisoners from Sylhet jail. Mass killings followed, among them at Ilashpur in Balaganj on 6 May; the district has 13 recorded mass graves. Pakistani troops dynamited Keane Bridge, and presses printing the Sylheti Nagri script were damaged.

The battle of Gazipur on 4 and 5 December and the battle of Sylhet from 7 to 15 December ended in the town's liberation, and the Pakistani surrender in Dhaka followed on 16 December 1971. Osmani died in London on 16 February 1984 and lies in the grounds of the Shahjalal dargah; the Osmani Museum in the city keeps his memory.

Sylhet since 1971

In 1983 and 1984 the subdivisions of the old Sylhet district became the districts of Sylhet, Sunamganj, Habiganj and Moulvibazar, and on 1 August 1995 they became Sylhet division, the country's sixth. The 1867 municipality became Sylhet City Corporation on 9 April 2001.

Shahjalal University of Science and Technology was founded in 1986 and began teaching in 1991. Also in 1986 the city's medical college, founded in 1962, took the name MAG Osmani Medical College, and the international airport bears Osmani's name too. The economy still rests on tea and diaspora money, alongside farming in the haor basin.

Tourism is the newest layer. Domestic visitors now crowd the shrines, tea gardens and border rivers, and the pressure shows in fragile places such as Ratargul and the stone rivers of the north; Responsible travel explains how to tread lightly. The main dates are set out below.

1. 7th century

   Bhaskaravarman of Kamarupa renews a land grant at Nidhanpur, now in Beanibazar.

2. c. 935

   Srichandra's Paschimbhag plate grants land in Srihatta to Brahmins and nine monasteries.

3. 1303

   Firuz Shah's forces, joined by Shahjalal, defeat Gour Govinda; Srihatta becomes Jalalabad.

4. 1345–46

   Ibn Battuta spends three days with Shahjalal.

5. 1512

   An inscription records the 1303 conquest; Rukn Khan enlarges the shrine.

6. 1612

   Islam Khan's campaign secures Mughal control.

7. 1680

   Lakshmi Singh builds the Jaintia palace at Jaintiapur.

8. 1765

   The East India Company takes the diwani; Sylhet comes under British rule.

9. 1778

   Robert Lindsay arrives as resident collector.

10. 1782

    The Muharram rising at the Shahi Eidgah is crushed.

11. 1835

    The Company annexes the Jaintia plains.

12. 1854

    Tea planting begins at Malnichhara, by Banglapedia's date.

13. 1867

    Sylhet town becomes a municipality.

14. 1874

    Sylhet is moved from Bengal into Assam.

15. 1892

    Murari Chand College opens on 27 June.

16. 1897

    The great Assam earthquake strikes.

17. 1921

    Some 30,000 tea workers join the Mulluk Cholo exodus.

18. 1936

    Keane Bridge opens across the Surma.

19. 1947

    Sylhet votes on 6 and 7 July to join East Bengal; most of Karimganj goes to India.

20. 1948

    Sylhet women petition for Bengali as a state language.

21. 1971

    Sylhet is freed after the battle of 7 to 15 December.

22. 1995

    Sylhet division is created on 1 August.

23. 2001

    Sylhet becomes a city corporation on 9 April.

Where to see this history today

Most of this can be seen in a day or two from Sylhet city.

• Shahjalal dargah: the saint's tomb, with Osmani's grave in its grounds.
• Shah Paran dargah: the city's other great shrine.
• Shahi Eidgah: the Mughal prayer ground and scene of the 1782 rising, near the Shahjalal dargah.
• Keane Bridge and Ali Amjad's clock: the Raj-era riverfront.
• Murari Chand College: the 1925 campus at Thackeray Tila; it is a working college, so be discreet during classes.
• Osmani Museum, and the Bhashasainik Matin Uddin Ahmed Museum with the Paschimbhag copper plate.
• Gour Govinda's fort: listed by Banglapedia among the district's historic sites and linked by tradition to the last king of Gour.
• Malnichhara and the Sreemangal tea gardens: the landscape of 19th-century tea.
• Jaintiapur Rajbari and megaliths: palace ruins and standing stones on the Jaflong road.

For a one-day loop, see the Shahjalal dargah and Shahi Eidgah in the morning, MC College and the museums at midday and Keane Bridge in the late afternoon. Dress modestly at the shrines and Eidgah, and check museum opening days locally. For beds near the centre, see Sylhet city stays.

For more, see Shrines, temples and sacred sites and Sylhet City.

Hazrat Shahjalal DargahThe shrine of the 14th-century Sufi saint who gave Sylhet its name as the spiritual capital.Hazrat Shah Paran DargahHilltop shrine of Shahjalal’s nephew, reached by a long stair on the eastern edge of the city.Keane Bridge & Ali Amjad’s ClockThe 1930s steel bridge over the Surma and the 19th-century clock tower that face each other.Jaintiapur Rajbari & MegalithsRuins of the Jaintia kingdom and standing stones that once marked royal ceremonies.Malnichhara Tea EstateUsually called Bangladesh’s oldest commercial tea garden, dated to 1854 by Banglapedia (some accounts say 1849), minutes from the airport road.Sreemangal Tea GardensRolling estates, the Tea Research Institute and the famous seven-colour tea of Sreemangal.