Mian Muhammad Muradyab Khan Kalhoro (Sindhi: مياں محمد مرادیاب خان ڪلهوڙو) was a Kalhora noble.
[1] At the beginning of Shawwal, 1152 AH (1739 CE), Muhammad Muradyab left Thatta and went with his father to the fort of Umarkot to ride out Nader Shah's invasion.
[2] After Nader Shah was assassinated in 1747, Muradyab left Tehran to return to Sindh while his brothers remained in Iran.
[2] The two shaikhs had been the last scions of a renowned Shi’i religious family, and their deaths had a strong impression on the Shi’i community in Sindh; the poet Muhammad Pannah Reja wrote a poem in their memory, comparing their deaths to the martyrdom of Ali’s sons Hasan and Husayn.
[2] This was an important step in establishing Kalhoro independence after Nader Shah’s invasion because the previous wazir, Gidu Mal, had been based at the Iranian court.
[2] Muhammad Muradyab had originally accompanied his father on the way to Umarkot, but worried that he was going to be taken as a hostage again, he ended up leaving and going a different way.
[1] Toward the end of the lunar year, Muhammad Muradyab decided to campaign against the Jam of Kakrala in the southern Indus Delta.
[2] Political and economic instability were the main issues, and contemporary Dutch records also mention that many Sindhi traders complained to them about Muradyab Khan’s oppressive rule.
[2] In any case, by 1757 Muhammad Muradyab had become fed up with the kharaj demands from Ahmad Shah Abdali, and he decided to leave Sindh and sail to Muscat.
[1] The Kalhoro nobles refused to break the treaty they had made at the end of the previous Kakrala campaign, and according to the Tuhfat-ul-Kiram of Alisher Kanei this was when they decided to support Ghulam Shah instead.
[1] So on the night before the 13th of Dhu’l al-Hijjah, 1170 AH (1757 CE), the nobles went to Muradyab’s residence and took him and his closest allies prisoner.
[1] When the Kalhoro nobles heard that Atur Khan had a royal decree in his favour, they mostly decided that it would be best to submit to his authority, and they abandoned Ghulam Shah’s cause.
[2] It is considered the beginning of the Later Kalhora period, a politically tumultuous time when Sindh was a client state of Afghanistan rather than the Mughal Empire.
[2] He sought out the Dutch East India Company as a trading partner to help strengthen the economy, which also led to the English getting involved around the same time.
[1] In the Fatehnama, which he wrote in 1783, Muhammad Azim described Muradyab as “neither brave nor experienced in manly exercise… night and day, he was engaged in pleasure parties and in enjoying the company of dancing girls and singers".
[1] This article includes content derived from "History of Sind - translated from Persian books," by Mirza Kalichbeg Fredunbeg (1853–1929), published in Karachi in 1902 and now in the public domain.