Bukkur, 2 July 1572. A Mughal officer called Itimad Khan came down the Indus and landed at the island fort of Bukkur with four elephants, a horse, a dress of honour and a jewelled sword belt. He had not come to fight. He had come to collect a bride for his emperor.
The bride was Bhakkari Begum, the only daughter of Sultan Mahmud Kokaltash, the ruler of Upper Sindh. Akbar was not with him. The emperor was waiting in Rajputana, near Ajmer, and the marriage contract was read out in Bukkur in his absence. It is one of the few Mughal imperial marriages solemnised on Sindhi soil, and it happened within sight of Rohri.
This article reconstructs the event from the Mughal-era chronicle of Mir Masum Shah Bhakkari, from Tarikh-e-Sukkur, and from the oral collection of the Rohri historian Syed Imdad Hussain Shah Rizvi of Kotai. It also follows the two earlier stories that explain why the wedding happened at all: the executions at the Bloody Bastion, and the night Sultan Mahmud's mother set the Indus on fire.
In short: in 980 AH (1572 CE) Akbar married Bhakkari Begum, daughter of Sultan Mahmud of Bukkur. Itimad Khan reached Bukkur on 2 July 1572 with a dress, a jewelled scimitar belt, a horse with saddle and reins, and four elephants. Sultan Mahmud feasted for fifteen days, gave the envoy 30,000 rupees, and sent his daughter to Ajmer with a dowry and an entourage. She entered the imperial harem and disappears from the record.
| The 1572 marriage at a glance | |
|---|---|
| Groom | Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar, third Mughal emperor |
| Bride | Bhakkari Begum (بکري بيگم), daughter of Sultan Mahmud Kokaltash of Bukkur |
| Date | 980 AH, 1572 CE; the imperial envoy reached Bukkur on 2 July 1572 |
| Where | Bukkur fort and island, Indus river, opposite Rohri and Old Sukkur |
| Who stood in for the emperor | Itimad Khan, Akbar's envoy, with the qazis and ulema of Bukkur |
| Gifts sent to the bride's father | A dress of honour, a jewelled scimitar belt, a horse with saddle and reins, four elephants |
| What Sultan Mahmud gave back | Fifteen days of feasts, rewards to ulema and nobles, 30,000 rupees to the envoy, a dowry and an entourage |
| Where the bride went | Ajmer, in Rajputana, where Akbar was encamped |
| What happened to the fort | Bhakkar passed under direct Mughal control within two years; Sindh was annexed by 1593 |
1. What the record says, and what the town remembers
Two kinds of evidence meet in this story, and they do not say the same things.
The first is the court chronicle. Mir Muhammad Masum Shah Bhakkari wrote the Tarikh-i-Masumi, also called the Tarikh-i-Sindh, around 1600. His family came from Bhakkar and had served its rulers, which makes him close to the events but not neutral about them; he disliked Sultan Mahmud, and says so. His book is the source behind the standard modern account, including Mahmudul Hasan Siddiqi's annotated translation of 1972 and the imperial marriage notices that follow it. It gives the marriage a precise date, a list of gifts and a sequence of ceremonies.
The second is local memory. Tarikh-e-Sukkur by Rahimdad Khan Molai Shedai, published in Sindhi in 1985, keeps the Upper Sindh version of the same century, and it preserves material the court chronicle does not bother with: the tribal chiefs executed at the Bloody Bastion, the burning boats, the family graves. That material survives in Sindhi, in the oral collection of Syed Imdad Hussain Shah Rizvi of Kotai, and in the older town histories of the region.
The method used here is simple. Dates, names and gifts come from the chronicle. Atmosphere, family memory and place come from the local tradition, and are marked as such. Where the two disagree, the chronicle wins on chronology and the town wins on what the place felt like.
2. Sindh in 1572: an empire that had already broken
To understand why a Mughal emperor was marrying into a river fort in Sindh, you have to go back fifty years, to a dynasty that arrived from Kandahar and never quite became a state.
Shah Beg Arghun took Bukkur in 1520-21 and made the island his northern capital. His son Mirza Shah Hasan Arghun ruled for three decades and married his daughter Chuchak Begum to Mirza Kamran, a son of Babur and brother of Humayun. That was the first marriage between the house of Bukkur and the house of Babur, and it ended badly: Kamran was blinded and sent to Mecca on Humayun's orders.
Shah Hasan died around 1555 leaving no son. His two chief commanders divided the country between them by treaty instead of fighting to the end. Sultan Mahmud Kokaltash took Upper Sindh, from Bukkur down to Sehwan. Mirza Isa Khan Tarkhan took Lower Sindh and the capital at Thatta. The two men spent the rest of their lives in a cold quarrel that occasionally turned hot, and both of them spent it watching the Mughals come closer.
By 1572 the Mughal frontier had reached Multan and the edge of the Sindh desert. In the local account, an imperial commander named Gisu Khan had already pushed down to Ubauro, in what is now Ghotki district, when Sultan Mahmud made his move. The old ruler was ageing, his only child was a daughter, and the Tarkhans of Thatta were waiting for him to die. A marriage to Akbar was the cheapest army he could buy.
3. The house of Mir Fazil, and the Bloody Bastion
Sultan Mahmud was not an Arghun prince. He was the son of a soldier. The local genealogy gives him as Mahmud Kokaltash bin Mir Fazil bin Khawaja Adil bin Khawaja Ahmad, and it places his grandfather Mir Fazil in the train of Shah Beg Arghun's invasion, holding the offices that a military dynasty hands out to its own: salar for command, kotwal for the fort.
That origin explains both his power and his reputation. He was a made man of the Arghun system, promoted inside it, and when the system collapsed he was the one holding the fort. The chronicles also remember him as a hard ruler, a strong swimmer who crossed the gorge currents for sport, and a man with a long-running feud with the family of Mir Masum Shah. The Sukkur tradition puts a darker story at his door.
Local accounts describe a meeting at Sukkur arranged for peace, sulh bhani, to which the Mahar and Dhareja chiefs were invited. Once inside, they were seized and put to death, and their bodies were thrown from the high wall that the town still calls Khooni Burj, the Bloody Bastion. The same tradition says that Sultan Mahmud and the Qazi of Sukkur then advised the Arghun authorities that the Rizvi Syeds inside Bukkur fort were strong enough to raise a rebellion.
The result was a forced move. The Rizvi Syeds were shifted across the river to Rohri, and other leading families were settled in Old Sukkur. For a site like this one, that is the most consequential sentence in the whole story: the religious families who dominate the old town's shrines and graveyards arrived there, according to local memory, as a security measure of the Arghun state.
Whether every detail survives scrutiny is a fair question. The executions are not in the Mughal court histories, and the Bloody Bastion is a place name as much as a documented event. What can be said is that the story is stable, specific and locally transmitted, and that it explains a real change in the town's population.
4. Shal Begum and the night the river burned
The best story in the family belongs to Sultan Mahmud's mother.
Shal Begum is remembered as a Pashtun noblewoman of the Kansi of Quetta. Her son's hold on Bukkur was not secure in the 1540s: the Langahs of Multan, who had lost their city to the Mughals, still controlled the river approaches, and their governor Bakshu Langah brought a fleet down the Indus to take the island.
What happened next is preserved in the Sindhi account rather than in any imperial record. Shal Begum had the defenders collect thick reed mats, tadda, and coarse woven cloth, rawa, soaked them in oil, set them alight and floated them downstream into the moored boats. Wooden river craft packed close together at night have no answer to fire coming at them on the current. The fleet burned; the landing failed; Bakshu Langah withdrew.
The local tradition adds a detail that can be checked on the ground, at least in principle: the descendants of the Langah soldiers who survived are said to have settled in Old Sukkur, and are remembered there among the Qasmi families. That is the kind of claim that local genealogy makes and documents cannot settle. It is offered here as tradition, not as fact.
What the tradition does establish is that Bukkur in this period was defended by a woman who understood the river as a weapon. That matters for the marriage story, because it explains why the fort survived long enough for Sultan Mahmud to have anything to negotiate with.
5. The famine that moved an emperor
There is a strange circularity in this history. In 1541 Humayun, driven out of India by Sher Shah Suri, came down to Sindh looking for a base. He camped at Rohri and Sukkur, and at the royal garden at Babarloi. Sultan Mahmud, who had no interest in hosting a Mughal army, is said to have forbidden the sowing of crops around Sukkur. No harvest, no forage, no grain to buy.
Humayun's army began to starve. He moved his camp, and eventually moved on, first towards Umerkot and then into the desert. On 15 October 1542, at Umerkot, a son was born to him: Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar.
So the man who refused to feed Akbar's father, thirty years later, married his daughter to Akbar. The Sukkur account is aware of the irony and does not soften the earlier episode: it remembers Sultan Mahmud as a ruler who used hunger as a weapon and won. The Mughal histories remember the same months as an exile and a birth.
6. The petition, the embassy, and 2 July 1572
This part of the story is documented, and unusually concrete.
Sultan Mahmud had one child, a daughter. Her name in the chronicles is Bhakkari Begum, the lady of Bhakkar, after the country rather than the island; local Sindhi calls her Bakri Begum. With the Mughal commander at Ubauro and no son to inherit, Sultan Mahmud sent a request to the imperial court offering her to Akbar. Akbar accepted.
On 2 July 1572 his envoy Itimad Khan reached Sultan Mahmud's court. The gifts he brought are listed in the Mughal account: a dress of honour, a jewelled scimitar belt, a horse with saddle and reins, and four elephants. The local memory of the same embassy is more colourful and less bureaucratic, and remembers a horse with a golden saddle and trappings and a jewelled ceremonial sword.
Sultan Mahmud did not treat the arrival as a formality. He feasted for fifteen days. On the wedding day the ulema, the saints and the nobles were rewarded with gifts, and he handed the envoy 30,000 rupees in cash and kind — a large sum for a river principality whose revenue came from boat traffic and a thin strip of irrigated land.
Then he sent his daughter down the road to Ajmer with a dowry and an entourage. When she arrived, she waited on the emperor, and the presents her father had sent were distributed among the ladies of the harem. That last detail is from the Mughal side and is worth pausing on: a Sindhi fort's tribute ended up as gifts between women in an imperial household, which is where the politics of these marriages actually happened.
7. The nikah read in a fort, and the bride who vanishes
Akbar was not at Bukkur. He was in Rajputana, hunting and encamped near Ajmer, and the marriage contract was therefore solemnised in the fort without him, with Itimad Khan standing in for the groom and the qazis and ulema of Sukkur officiating. Proxy marriage of this kind was normal at the Mughal court, and it solved a practical problem: an emperor did not travel to collect a wife from a frontier fortress in the middle of a campaign season.
What it meant for the town is harder to measure. For a few weeks in the summer of 1572, Bukkur was the centre of an imperial ceremony: an envoy of the emperor, a contract read in the fort, feasts, rewards, and a bride leaving with a Mughal escort. Then the court moved on.
Bhakkari Begum's later life is not recorded. She enters the harem, receives her father's gifts, and drops out of the chronicles. There is no known tomb, no known children, no letters. Wikipedia's list of Akbar's consorts gives the marriage and the year and nothing more. For a woman who was the instrument of a state's survival, that silence is the most revealing thing about her position.
The men did not do much better. Within two years the fortress at Bhakkar was under direct imperial control, and by 1591-93 Akbar's armies had taken Sehwan and Thatta and ended Tarkhan rule. The marriage bought Sultan Mahmud a quiet end, not a dynasty.
8. The tomb near the Red Cross Hospital
Local tradition is clear about where Sultan Mahmud lies. His tomb stands in Old Sukkur, near the Red Cross Hospital, on ground that once held a family cemetery and a sarai — the caravanserai and grave plot he is said to have built opposite the site where the Masum Shah Minar would later rise.
According to the oral account, the surrounding graveyard and the courtyard of the house were absorbed by later settlement after 1947, and the tomb survived because a caretaker took it on. Visitors today find a single grave where a family plot once stood, and a shrine that has quietly acquired a local following.
This is the part of the story where the written record and the ground disagree most. The chronicles do not describe the tomb, and the gazetteers do not list it. If you go, go for the place rather than for a plaque: the value of the site is that it fixes the end of the Arghun century in a specific street in Old Sukkur, next to a hospital, behind a gate.
9. Visiting: the fort, the minar and the grave
| Site | What it tells you | Practical note |
|---|---|---|
| Bukkur island and fort | Where the nikah was read in 1572, and the Arghun capital before that | Island access is restricted; the fort is best seen from the Lansdowne Bridge approach and the Rohri bank |
| Masum Shah Minar | The Mughal town that replaced the Arghun one, built by the family of the chronicler | Climb in the morning; the stair is narrow and unlit |
| Tomb of Sultan Mahmud | The last Arghun-era ruler of Upper Sindh | Near the Red Cross Hospital, Old Sukkur; ask locally, there is no signboard |
| Dargah Sadar Din Shah Badshah | The Suhrawardi shrine on Bukkur island, older than the Mughal marriage | Combine with a walk on the Rohri side of the river |
| Bunder Road and the 1895 water works | How the river town that grew from this history got its water | The 1941 reservoir near District Jail is the easiest structure to see |
The best months are November to February. Summer heat on the limestone is punishing, and the river is at its lowest and clearest in winter, which is when you can see how the island sits in the gorge.
10. Frequently asked questions
Did Emperor Akbar get married in Sukkur?
Yes, in the sense that matters: the marriage contract was solemnised at Bukkur, the island fort opposite Sukkur and Rohri, in 980 AH (1572 CE). Akbar himself was not present. His envoy Itimad Khan stood in for him, and the bride was escorted to the emperor at Ajmer afterwards.
Who was Bhakkari Begum?
She was the only daughter of Sultan Mahmud Kokaltash, the ruler of Upper Sindh from Bukkur to Sehwan. The chronicles call her Bhakkari Begum, the lady of Bhakkar; local Sindhi calls her Bakri Begum. She married Akbar in 1572 and entered the imperial harem. Nothing further about her life is recorded.
Who was Itimad Khan?
He was one of Akbar's trusted envoys, used for marriage negotiations and escorts. He had performed the same service in 1564 for the daughter of the ruler of Khandesh. He reached Sultan Mahmud's court at Bukkur on 2 July 1572 with the imperial gifts.
What gifts did Akbar send?
The Mughal account lists a dress of honour, a jewelled scimitar belt, a horse with saddle and reins, and four elephants. The Sukkur tradition remembers a horse with a golden saddle and trappings and a jewelled ceremonial sword. Sultan Mahmud feasted for fifteen days in return and gave the envoy 30,000 rupees in cash and kind.
Who was Shal Begum?
Sultan Mahmud's mother, remembered as a Pashtun noblewoman of the Kansi of Quetta. Local tradition credits her with defending Bukkur against a riverborne attack by Bakshu Langah, governor of Multan, by setting oil-soaked reed mats alight and floating them into the enemy fleet.
What is Khooni Burj in Sukkur?
The "Bloody Bastion", a high wall in Sukkur where, according to the local account, Mahar and Dhareja chiefs invited for peace talks were executed and their bodies thrown down. The same tradition links the aftermath to the forced relocation of the Rizvi Syeds from Bukkur fort to Rohri.
Where is Sultan Mahmud's tomb?
Local tradition places it near the Red Cross Hospital in Old Sukkur, on the site of a family cemetery and caravanserai he is said to have built opposite the later Masum Shah Minar. The surrounding graves have been built over; the tomb itself survives.
Is Bhakkari Begum buried in Sukkur?
No. There is no grave of hers in Sukkur, and no record of her death or burial anywhere. She entered the Mughal harem at Ajmer and left no trace in the chronicles.
11. Sources and further reading
Primary and near-contemporary
- Mir Muhammad Masum Shah Bhakkari, Tarikh-i-Masumi (also Tarikh-i-Sindh), c. 1600. English translation: Mahmudul Hasan Siddiqi, History of the Arghuns and Tarkhans of Sindh, 1507-1593 (Institute of Sindhology, University of Sindh, 1972). The marriage is at pp. 166 ff. of the translation.
- Abul Fazl, Akbarnama, and Abdul Qadir Badauni, Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh, for the imperial court context of 1572.
Local and regional history
- Rahimdad Khan Molai Shedai, Tarikh-e-Sukkur (Sindhi Adabi Board, Jamshoro, 1985). Not digitised. The source of the Khooni Burj, Shal Begum, Babarloi and tomb material used here.
- Sayed Imdad Hussain Shah Rizvi, Rohri and Kotai: oral collection and family papers, recorded 2025-2026. Used for local topography and family memory, not for dates.
- A. Paliwal, "A Buffer State of the Sixteenth Century: Sultan Mahmud and his Principality of Bhakkar", Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 62 (2001), available through JSTOR.
- Suhail Zaheer Lari, A History of Sindh (Oxford University Press), for the Arghun-Tarkhan partition.
- E. H. Aitken, Gazetteer of the Province of Sind, Volume III: Sukkur District (Bombay, 1907), for the town as the British found it.
Reference
- Akbar and Bhakkar on Wikipedia, which summarise the Siddiqi translation for the 1572 marriage and the 1574 takeover.
Image note: none of the four images in this article is a historical photograph. The fort and tomb illustrations are reconstructions; the two figure illustrations follow sixteenth-century Mughal and Persian miniature conventions and are not likenesses. They are included to show how the places and the people were imagined, and are labelled as such in each caption.
If you are researching this period, the next article in this series follows the Indus crossings at Rohri and Bukkur from the Stone Age to the Mughal conquest, and the civil hospital article covers the ground next to Sultan Mahmud's tomb.
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