Abbas Sarwani Counted 1,700 Rest Houses on Sher Shah Suri's Roads, and the Silver Rupee He Struck Outlasted His Five-Year Reign

Abbas Khan Sarwani, who wrote his life of Sher Shah Suri around 1579 on Akbar’s orders, says the Afghan ruler built a rest house (sarai) every two kos on his main roads, 1,700 in all, with a well and a brick mosque at the centre of each. A kos is the old Indian unit of road distance. Sher Shah held Hindustan for about five years, from 1540 to his death in 1545, and later writers credit those years with the road that became the Grand Trunk Road, a standard silver rupee and a measured land revenue. They disagree on how much of each was his own idea.

A horse-dealer’s grandson takes the throne

He was born Farid. K. R. Qanungo, whose Sher Shah and His Times (1965) is the fullest modern biography, says Farid’s father Hasan held Sasaram and a neighbouring village near Rohtas in Bihar, in return for keeping 500 horsemen. Abu’l Fazl sneered that the grandfather Ibrahim was a horse-dealer, and Qanungo notes that a later chronicle, the Khulasatu-t Tawarikh, says the same.

Sher Khan, as he was then called, fought Humayun twice. At Chausa, near Buxar, the armies faced each other for about two and a half months, in the account by Jauhar that Qanungo quotes, with daily skirmishes and talks about peace. Qanungo dates the Afghan attack to the dawn of 27 June 1539. Humayun’s soldiers led him toward the Ganges, he was thrown from his horse in the river, and a water-carrier named Nizam, crossing on an inflated leather bag, pulled him out. Badauni, a court scholar under Akbar, told a story of Sher Khan swearing on the Quran to keep a truce and then breaking it. Qanungo calls that story a myth and argues that no peace was ever concluded.

The second battle was fought near Kannauj, also called Bilgram. Mirza Haidar, a Mughal commander posted on Humayun’s left, dates it to 10 Muharram 947, which Qanungo converts to 17 May 1540. Humayun lost the field and the throne.

The date of Sher Khan’s own enthronement is argued. Vincent Smith gave January 1542, which Qanungo calls a pure guess, and Qanungo reads the Persian chronicles as placing a coronation at Gaur about December 1539. Either way, Qanungo counts six months as king of Bengal and Jaunpur and five years as emperor of Hindustan.

Sher Shah died at the siege of Kalinjar, when a grenade rebounded off the fort wall into a heap of others and fireworks. Qanungo converts the Hijri date to 22 May 1545. The Rohtas district government page gives 13 May.

The road from Sonargaon

Sarwani lists four roads. One ran from “the fort which he built in the Panjab” to Sonargaon, the old port city near Dhaka. A second went from Agra to Burhanpur, on the border of the Deccan. A third ran from Agra to Jodhpur and Chitor, and a fourth from Lahore to Multan. Altogether, the translation reads, he built 1,700 rest houses on these roads.

Where the main road ended is not settled. Qanungo records that the chronicles of Nizamuddin and Firishta carry it to the Indus, a length of 1,500 kos, while Sarwani and Badauni stop at the Punjab fort, which is Rohtas. Popular tradition extends it to Peshawar, which Qanungo calls doubtful. Banglapedia, the Bangladeshi encyclopaedia, names the road Sarak-i-Azam, the great road, and puts its eastern end at Sonargaon, in Bengal.

A well, a mosque and two horses at every stop

Sarwani lists what each sarai held. There were separate lodgings for Hindus and Muslims, and pots of drinking water at the gate. Brahmans were settled there to feed Hindu travellers, and every guest got food and fodder from the government according to his rank. Villages were founded around the rest houses. In the middle stood a well and a brick mosque with an imam, a muezzin, a custodian and watchmen, all paid from land beside the sarai. Fruit and shade trees lined both sides of the highway.

Two horses stood ready at each stop to carry news, and Sarwani says 3,400 horses were kept in the sarais in all. He adds that a courier, Husain Tashtdar, once rode 300 kos in a day. A footnote in the Elliot and Dowson translation calls that feat impossible and quotes a variant in which the rider covers the road from Gaur to Chitor in three days.

The spacing varies by writer. Sarwani, Badauni and the Khulasatu-t Tawarikh say two kos, while Nizamuddin says one, in Qanungo’s survey. The Tarikh-i Daudi says Sher Shah built at one kos and that his son Islam Shah added others between them, so that one stood at every half kos. One manuscript gives 2,500 sarais, and a later work, the Nawadiru-l Hikayat, puts 2,500 on the Bengal to Indus road alone. The Elliot and Dowson footnote blames a road length of 2,500 kos and a sarai at every kos instead of every second one.

Safety on the road came from collective liability. In Sarwani’s account, when a theft occurred and the thief was not found, the governors arrested the headmen of the surrounding villages and made them repay the loss. For a murder, headmen who could not name the killer were put to death. Qanungo grants that a modern reader may recoil from the rule but calls it suited to its age. Customs duty, Sarwani writes, was levied at only two places, Garhi on the way in from Bengal and the north-western frontier, and again at the place of sale.

The mounted post was not new. The Tarikh-i Daudi describes Sikandar Lodi keeping post-horses ready at every sarai around 1507, and a footnote in Elliot and Dowson says Sikandar has the credit for establishing the posts before Sher Shah. Qanungo quotes Barani’s account of Alauddin Khalji’s relays of horses and runners. He also cites Shaikh Nur-ul-Haqq, writing under Jahangir, who says Sher Khan made the Delhi to Agra road by cutting through jungle, because travellers had earlier gone through the Doab. Megasthenes, as quoted in the Chandragupta Maurya article, reports Mauryan officers who built roads and set up a pillar every ten stadia. Qanungo’s own verdict is that portions of Sher Shah’s roads may be older work, and that the general plan was his.

A silver rupee of about 178 grains

The Reserve Bank of India Museum credits Sher Shah with the system of silver, gold and copper coins that later marked Mughal money. Its page says the silver rupiya weighed 178 grains, the gold mohur 169 grains, and that copper dams were struck beside them. It says the rupiya was “largely unchanged till the early 20th Century.”

The weights differ by source. In Qanungo’s book, Vincent Smith’s entry in the Imperial Gazetteer gives the rupee as 180 grains with 175 of pure silver. Qanungo lists surviving gold pieces of about 166 to 168.5 grains and copper dams of 311 to 322 grains. Thomas, author of Chronicles of the Pathan Kings of Delhi, put the exchange rate between copper and silver at 64 to 1, though Qanungo cites him with caution because later numismatists revised some of his views.

Smith, quoted by Qanungo, credits Sher Shah with ending the mixed-metal billon coinage and striking gold, silver and copper to a fixed weight and fineness. In Smith’s words, the system lasted throughout the Mughal period and was maintained by the East India Company down to 1835. The land revenue of 33 crore 25 lakh rupees that Jadunath Sarkar reckons for Aurangzeb’s long reign is counted in the coin the Reserve Bank says stayed largely unchanged from this one.

The coins also work as evidence. Qanungo points to issues from Ujjain in 949 AH, Sakkar-Bakkar in Sindh in 950 and Mount Abu in 951, scarcely six months after each conquest, and says Sher Shah’s reach to Mount Abu and Sakkar-Bakkar is known only from his coins.

Measured fields and a schedule of rates

Sarwani says each pargana (a cluster of villages) had one amir, one shiqdar (a revenue officer), a treasurer and two clerks, one writing Hindi and one Persian. Governors were to measure the land at every harvest and collect in proportion to the crop. Officials were rotated every year or two. When an army marched through fields, Sarwani writes, surveyors measured the damage and the cultivator was paid in money.

Qanungo adds that the survey used the yard of Sikandar Lodi, 32 finger-widths long, with a rope, and that an official called an amin took a written agreement from each farmer and gave him a title-deed, a patta. Abu’l Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari, in Qanungo’s quotation, says Sher Khan and Salim Khan measured land with this yard, and that under them Hindustan was released from the custom of dividing the grain.

The rate is where the historians split. Qanungo’s 1921 monograph and his 1965 book hold that the state took one fourth of the expected produce. Moreland, who answered him in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1926, says the Ain preserves Sher Shah’s schedule of rates. For each main crop it adds the yields of a good, a middling and a poor bigha, treats a third of that total as the average produce, and takes a third of the average. On his reading the share was a third where Qanungo found a fourth. Both record Multan as an exception, where Sher Shah told his governor to respect local custom and take a fourth.

Moreland found nothing to show whether farmers paid in grain or in cash, and he doubts that the schedule’s units match Akbar’s.

Qanungo writes that the system was popularly called Todar Mal’s bandobast, the Mughal settlement. Moreland puts it more cautiously. Akbar began by adopting Sher Shah’s methods, he says, and changed them only when they broke down. The Akbar article traces what came next, including the ten-year settlement and the quarrel over who designed it.

Rohtas and the tomb at Sasaram

On the road to Khurasan Sher Shah built a fort to keep Kashmir and the Gakhar country in check, about 60 kos from Lahore. Sarwani says he heard that stone was scarce and the overseers asked for more money, and that Sher Shah told them to go on building even if they paid for the stone “its weight in copper.” UNESCO dates the start of work to 1541 and describes walls more than four kilometres around, 68 bastions and 12 gateways. The garrison complex stayed in use until 1707. This is Rohtas in the Punjab, not the Rohtas fort in Bihar, where Sarwani says Sher Shah kept treasure without number.

His tomb stands at Sasaram. The Rohtas district government page says it is a red sandstone building 122 feet high on an artificial lake of 22 acres, and that an inscription dates its completion to 16 August 1545, three months after his death. Vincent Smith, in Qanungo’s quotation, ranks it among the best designed buildings in India. Where Sher Shah lies is less sure. Badauni says the body was taken to Sasaram, while a Bundelkhand gazetteer records a local tradition of burial near Kalinjar. Qanungo allows that the remains may have been moved later.

Reading Sarwani

Sarwani was connected to Sher Shah’s family by marriage, according to the editors’ headnote in Elliot and Dowson, and he held a command of 500 horse under Akbar that he lost. The editors call his work a biography rather than a history and say its dates are few. Moreland reports that the manuscripts differ, that they omit sentences found in the translation, and that, so far as he could learn, nobody had established a definitive text.

Nile Green, reviewing Raziuddin Aquil’s study of the Afghan rulers, points out that most Persian histories of the Indo-Afghans were written under the Mughals. Sarwani’s own book was written to Akbar’s order, about 34 years after Sher Shah’s death.

The road after him

Islam Shah, Sher Shah’s son, put alms-giving at each sarai, according to the Tarikh-i Daudi. The British later gave the road its best-known name. Banglapedia says a development programme begun in 1839, with the Kolkata military establishment responsible for the Bengal and northern sections, was completed in 1848 under Lord Dalhousie. In the Punjab, Captain Napier, later Lord Napier of Magdala, headed a new public works department from 1849. K. M. Sarkar, a Punjab government historian, writes that the Lahore to Peshawar section ran to 263 miles and that the whole road was completely metalled by 1866. Government papers he quotes call it the “Grand Military Road.” Qanungo notes that country people identified the Grand Trunk Road with Sher Shah’s road, which Banglapedia gives as Sarak-i-Azam.

Rudyard Kipling’s narrator in Kim (1901) describes it as running straight for fifteen hundred miles, “such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world.” The brick pillars called kos minars that marked its stages are still being counted. The Tribune reported on 23 July 2025 that a survey by the American Institute of Indian Studies, run from 2023 to 2025, documented 47 of them in Haryana, described as dating from the reigns of Sher Shah, Akbar and Jahangir, and more than 100 across Haryana, Punjab, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.