Khalifatabad

Khalifatabad developed on the southern bank of the old Bhairab River in southwestern Bengal. Founded under Ulugh Khan Jahan in the fifteenth century, it combined mosques and religious foundations with roads, bridges, reservoirs and water-management works. The surviving monuments show a distinctive regional use of baked brick. Shait Gumbad, the great congregational mosque, anchors one group of buildings, while Khan Jahan's mausoleum forms the centre of another farther east.

Religious patronage was closely connected with the organisation of settlement in this deltaic country. The city continued to have a political and commercial identity after Khan Jahan's death in 1459. Coins identify Khalifatabad as a mint in 1516, when Nusrat Shah issued money in his own name during his father's lifetime. Issues continued under Ghiyasuddin Mahmud Shah, with a surviving coin dated 1535. The town's history consequently extends beyond the life of its founder: its religious buildings, public infrastructure and coinage place it within the developing institutions of the Bengal Sultanate.