01What the Mirat-i-Masudi tells
The Mirat-i-Masudi was written in Jahangir’s reign by Abd-ur-Rahman Chishti as a life of Salar Masud, a warrior it calls the nephew of Mahmud of Ghazni and honours as a saint. It tells that Masud pushed east from Satrikh into Awadh, and that the rajas of Bahraich and the country around joined against him. Their chief it names Suhal Dev, or Sohar Deo. In the battle at Bahraich, dated in the book to 1033, Masud and his army were killed.
The Ghaznavid chroniclers of the time, al-Utbi and Baihaqi, do not mention this campaign at all, so the event rests on the later book and on local memory.
02Remembered in Awadh
Ibn Battuta, travelling in the 1340s, found Salar Masud’s tomb at Bahraich already a great shrine, visited by Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq. The memory of the rajas who stopped him lived on in songs and village tradition across eastern Uttar Pradesh. Several communities, among them the Pasi and the Rajbhar, honour Suheldev as one of their own. India Post issued a stamp for Maharaja Suheldev in 2018, and in 2021 the foundation stone of a memorial to him was laid on the shore of Chittaura lake in Bahraich, the traditional site of the battle.
