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Bikaner
Bikaner
Walled desert city founded in 1488 by Rao Bika; capital of Bikaner State until 1947.
Rao Bikaji
Founder of Bikaner State and of the city of Bikaner. Son of Rao Jodha of Marwar; rode out of Jodhpur in 1465 and built a kingdom of 40,000 square miles in the Jangaldesh desert.
p>Bika was born on 5 August 1438 to Rao Jodha of Mandore and his Sankhla Parmar wife Navrang Kanwar of Roon. Sources differ on his birth order — some call him the fifth son, others simply a younger one — but they agree on the consequence: he was not going to inherit Marwar. Rao Jodha had a large family and a chronic problem of provision, and the standard Rajput solution was for surplus sons to go and win land elsewhere.</p><p>The precipitating incident, as the chronicles have it, was small. In 1465 Bika came late to his father's assembly and sat down beside his uncle Rawat Kandhal, with whom he began talking under his breath. Rao Jodha said aloud that the two of them must be planning the conquest of some new territory. Whether the remark was affectionate or barbed depends on which account you read; both men treated it as a licence. Kandhal, who had already helped establish Jodha himself in Marwar, swore to do the same for his nephew.</p><p>The target was suggested by Napo, a Sankhala Rajput: Jangaldesh, the desert tract to the north-west, weakened by internal war and held by no single power.</p>
p>Bika rode out of Jodhpur on 30 September 1465 with roughly a hundred horsemen and five hundred foot — a raiding party rather than an army. With him went Kandhal, his uncles Rupo, Mandan, Mandalo and Nathu, his brothers Bida and Jogayat, and the Rajpurohit Vikramji, who served as his adviser.</p><p>The tract was not empty. Bhati Rajputs held the west and north; the Johiyas and Bhattis clustered around Bhatner; and the east and south-east were settled by Jat clans — Godara, Saran, Beniwal, Punia, Sihag — who farmed and grazed under their own headmen and owed nothing to anyone. Bika's success rested on not treating them as a single enemy. He fought some and came to terms with others, and the Charan communities of the region, and Karni Mata in particular, lent him legitimacy that force alone would not have produced.</p><p>The Godara agreement is the most consequential. Rather than being subjugated, the Godara headman accepted Bika as ruler in exchange for the hereditary right to apply the <em>tilak</em> at the installation of every subsequent ruler of Bikaner. A Jat thumb marking a Rajput king's forehead is not a normal feature of Rajput ceremonial, and it persisted for four and a half centuries.</p><p>His marriage to Rang Kanwar, daughter of Rao Shekha the Bhati chief of Pugal, secured the western flank by alliance. In 1490 Kandhal was killed at the Battle of Sahawa against forces under Sarang Khan, the Lodi governor of Hisar — the cost of pushing the frontier towards the Punjab.</p>
p>The capital was founded in 1488, traditionally on Akshaya Tritiya — a date still marked in Bikaner with kite-flying. The name is simply Bika plus <em>ner</em>, place: the city of Bika. Before this the seat had been at Kodamdesar, where Bika built a Bhairav temple; he also raised the first shrine to Karni Mata at Deshnoke, later rebuilt in stone by Maharaja Surat Singh.</p><p>By 1504 the state extended to the southern limits of the Punjab. Bika died on 17 June 1504 and was succeeded by his eldest son Naro, who lasted less than a year, and then by Lunkaran.</p><p>Bika's real achievement was structural rather than territorial. He established that a landless younger son could found a state on the worst ground in Rajputana, and he did it through a mixture of conquest, marriage alliance, religious sanction and negotiated settlement with the people already there — a template the house followed for the next four hundred years.</p>
p>Mohammad Habib and Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, <em>A Comprehensive History of India</em>, vol. V, p. 816; Richard Saran and Norman P. Ziegler, <em>The Mertiyo Rathors of Merto, Rajasthan</em> (University of Michigan Press, 2001); Rima Hooja, <em>A History of Rajasthan</em> (2006), p. 385; Tanuja Kothiyal, <em>Nomadic Narratives: A History of Mobility and Identity in the Great Indian Desert</em> (Cambridge, 2016), p. 78; James Tod, <em>Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan</em>, vol. II.</p><p><strong>Dating note.</strong> Bika's departure from Jodhpur (30 September 1465) and the founding of the city (1488) are both given as the origin of Bikaner State depending on the source; the regnal list conventionally uses 1465. His birth order among Rao Jodha's sons is reported variously.</p>
Significance · REGIONAL
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