Sikandar Shah Miri
Shingara, better known as Sikandar Shah Miri (Kashmiri: سکندر شاہ میری, Persian: سِکَندَر شَاہ مِیرِی), also by his sobriquet Sikandar Butshikan (lit. Sikandar the Iconoclast) was the seventh Sultan of Kashmir and a member of Shah Mir dynasty who ruled from 1389 until his death in 1413. Sources The only contemporaneous source that exists is the Rajatarangini (lit. Flow of Succession of Kings) by Jonaraja. Jonaraja was the Brahmin court-poet of Sikandar's successor Zain-ul-Abidin and was commissioned to continue Kalhana's Rajatarangini. One manuscript of his work—edited between 1561 and 1588 by an anonymous person using information from other sources—emends certain portions of the text in the margins; he is conventionally called (and the work, Ps-JRT) in scholarship. Extant Persian sources, including Baharistan-i-shahi (anon.), Tohfatu'l-Ahbab (anon.) and Tarikh-i-Kashmir corpus, were written relatively later and drew from recensions of Rajatarangini(s) but they provide considerable additional information. These were later used by authors starting from Abul Fazl, the first chronicler from outside Kashmir and Nizamuddin Ahmad to independent Persian chroniclers to colonial historians and Kashmiri Pandits, with different ideological proclivities, to produce varying strands of histories suiting different sociopolitical goals. Background The Shah Miri dynasty likely descended from Khasa chieftains of Panjgabbar valley; Shah Mir himself was the first to settle in Kashmir. He began to serve in the royal court of the fledgling Deva Dynasty and before long, became the prime-minister of Suhadeva. Soon, he leveraged a power-vacuum in the wake of a crippling Mongol raid to help Rinchan, a Buddhist from Ladakh, usurp the throne and after his death, waged a successful war against widow Kota Rani to claim the kingdom for himself. The Shah Mirs actively patronaged Islam (esp. Sufism) and led to the formation of a new social order that chipped away at Brahminic Hinduism. A contemporary Shaivite mystic Lal Ded borrowed from Sufism and local cults to attack core tenets of Brahminism and likely, serviced conversion to Islam among the lower strata of society. By Sikandar's time, a considerable section of the populace had already adopted Islam. Nonetheless, the Kings continued to actively patronage Hinduism: Alaud'din had commissioned a Hindu Matha and Qutubu'd-Din had held royal yajnas. Birth and Ascension Sikandar was the great-grandson of Shah Mir; he was the eldest child of Qutubu'd-Din and Queen Sura (var. Subhata), and was born sometime around 1380. Because he was a minor at the time of his father's death—9 August 1389—, his mother had to act as a regent for a while. During her regency, Sura consented to Prime Minister Rai Magre (var. Uddaka), who was also her cousin, burning his own daughter and son-in-law Muhammad, son of a fellow minister Sahaka, on charges of conspiring against Sikandar. Magre went on to poison Haybat, Sikandar's younger brother and even Sahaka. Sikandar, sensing a possible usurpation of the throne by Magre, chose to exert himself as the ruler c. 1391. Military campaigns Except for a successful invasion of Ladakh under the command of Rai Magre, Sikandar did not annex any new