Sena dynasty

The Sena dynasty was a Hindu royal house that ruled Bengal from the late eleventh century into the thirteenth, taking over from the Pala Empire. Of southern Indian origin, the Senas rose from local lords to kings, and according to the Bangladeshi historian A. M. Chowdhury they were the first rulers to bring the whole of Bengal under a single government. Their court was a centre of Sanskrit literature, and their rule ended in the early thirteenth century when the general Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji took their capital.

Sena inscriptions trace the family to Karnata, the Kannada-speaking south of India. The Deopara inscription calls Samanta Sena, the first known member, a Brahma-Kshatriya, a term usually taken to mean a Brahmin family that took up arms. How the family reached Bengal is not known. One suggestion is that its members served as officers under the Palas, whose inscriptions mention recruits from Karnata; another is that they arrived with an invader from the Deccan. A copper plate suggests that the family had settled in western Bengal, in the Radha region, before Samanta Sena was born. Their caste status is still disputed: later Baidya genealogies claim the Senas, while Kayastha ones reject the claim.

Samanta Sena's son Hemanta Sena seems to have been a local chief under the Palas, and he is credited with taking the royal title around 1095. As Pala power weakened, his son Vijaya Sena built an independent kingdom. Vijaya Sena reigned for over sixty years, conventionally dated about 1096 to 1159, married a princess of the Shura family of southern Radha and was described as a friend of the Odisha king Anantavarman Chodaganga. By the middle of the twelfth century he had driven the last Palas from northern Bengal and ousted the Varman rulers of the south-east.

Vijaya Sena's son Ballala Sena (Vallalasena) is credited with the final defeat of the Palas and, according to tradition, conquered Mithila. His wife Ramadevi was a princess of the Western Chalukya Empire, a sign of ties with the south. He was a scholar and wrote the Danasagara in 1168. Later tradition credits him with introducing Kulinism, a ranking system among Bengali Brahmins, although Chowdhury notes that no Sena inscription mentions it and that the texts making the claim were written centuries later. His son Lakshmana Sena came to the throne around 1179. A later Sena copper plate says he set up victory pillars at Varanasi and Allahabad, and he was the first Sena king to call himself lord of Gauda.

The Sena kings were devout Hindus, Vijaya Sena and Ballala Sena as worshippers of Shiva and Lakshmana Sena as a Vaishnava. Their period is associated with a stronger orthodox Hinduism in a region where Buddhism had long flourished. Lakshmana Sena's court gathered leading Sanskrit poets, among them Jayadeva, author of the Gitagovinda, and Dhoyi, author of the Pavanaduta. Sena records name coins such as the purana and dramma, though cowrie shells were widely used as money in this period.

By the end of Lakshmana Sena's long reign the kingdom was breaking up as local chiefs asserted their independence. In 1203 or 1204 Bakhtiyar Khalji, a general serving the Ghurids, seized the city of Nadia (Nabadwip) in a sudden raid, an event described by the chronicler Minhaj-us-Siraj in the Tabaqat-i Nasiri. Lakshmana Sena is later recorded in south-eastern Bengal, where his sons Vishvarupa Sena and Keshava Sena ruled the Vikramapura and Vanga areas for about another quarter of a century. According to the Tabaqat-i Nasiri his descendants still ruled in Vanga in the 1240s. In the later thirteenth century the Deva dynasty took Vikramapura, and by the end of the century all of Bengal was under Muslim rule.

Our 1100 map labels the dynasty "Senas" and draws it in Bengal, in today's India and Bangladesh. On our 900 map the region belongs to the Pala Empire.