Page:Bulandshahr- Or, Sketches of an Indian District- Social, Historical and Architectural.djvu/72

 had been abandoned, he hastened to the spot and secured them. From that time his power and renown increased daily, and forces gathered round him, while Nusrat Khán grew weaker and weaker, so that after a stay of ten months he was able to leave Baran and recover possession of Delhi." He also got into his hands the person of the Sultán Mahmúd, whom he afterwards took to Kanauj and left there, while he himself reigned as the real sovereign of the country, till 1405, when he fell in battle at Multán.

Two years later, viz., in 1407, Ibráhim Sháh, the king of Jaunpur, marched up against Delhi, where Mahmúd was then enthroned; but hearing of disturbances at home he hastened back, leaving Marhaba Khán, a protegé of Ikbál's, with a small force, at Baran. After six months Mahmúd marched from Delhi against Baran, and Marhaba Khán came out to meet him; but in the battle that ensued he was beaten and driven back into the fort, where the Imperial troops followed and killed him.

The next mention of Baran is in 1421, during the reign of Khizr Khán, the first of the Saiyid dynasty, when the Vazir, Táj-ul-Mulk, marched through it on his way to suppress a rebellion in Kol and Etáwa. Again, in 1434, after the assassination of Khizr's successor, Mubárak Sháh, an army of the Hindu Vazír's, Sarwar-ul-Mulk, under the command of Kamál-ud-dín, proceeding against Allah Dád, the chief of the insurgents, halted at Baran, the half-way station between the Jamuná and the Ganges. Allah Dád withdrew to Ahár, where the two generals came to an understanding and turned their combined forces against the Vazír, whom they besieged in the fort of Delhi, where shortly afterwards he was slain in an attempt on the life of the Emperor Muhammad Sháh.

The earliest Persian inscription in Bulandshahr is a tablet let into the wall of the Ỉd-gáh, which records the construction of a mosque by Nek-bakht Khán, in the year 943 Hijri (1536 A. D.) in the reign of the Emperor Humáyun and during the governorship "of the chaste Báno Begam." The fact of a female Governor is somewhat curious. At Til Begampur, fifteen miles north-west of Bulandshahr, is a bathing-well (or báoli) with an inscription dated only two years later, viz., 1538, in which the local Governor's name is given as Amír Fakír Ali Beg. As an Ỉd-gáh would not be styled a mosque, the stone must have been brought from elsewhere, but probably from the immediate neighbourhood. Fragments of an Arabic inscription