Second Battle of Panipat

On 5 November 1556, on the plain of Panipat north of Delhi, the army of the thirteen-year-old Mughal emperor Akbar defeated Hemu, the Hindu general and minister who had just seized Delhi and crowned himself king under the title Vikramaditya. A stray arrow that struck Hemu in the eye turned a battle he seemed to be winning into a rout. The victory restored Delhi and Agra to the Mughals at the very start of Akbar's long reign.

The Mughal Empire was still fragile. Babur's successor Humayun had been driven out of India in 1540 by Sher Shah Suri, founder of the Sur Empire. After Sher Shah died in 1545 and his son Islam Shah in 1554, the Sur state fell into succession quarrels and revolts, and Humayun took advantage, regaining Delhi and Agra in July 1555. The Sur throne had passed to Adil Shah Suri, who had murdered his twelve-year-old nephew to obtain it and took little interest in government. Real power lay with Hemu, a man of humble origins from Rewari who had served Sher Shah and became both chief minister and commander of the Sur army.

Humayun died on 27 January 1556, leaving the boy Akbar under the guardianship of the general Bairam Khan. Hemu, then in Bengal, marched rapidly west, driving Mughal garrisons from a string of towns. The governor of Agra fled without fighting. At Tughlaqabad, just outside Delhi, Hemu defeated the Mughal governor Tardi Beg Khan and in early October 1556 entered Delhi, where he was crowned at the Purana Quila.

Akbar and Bairam Khan marched to recover the city. Shortly before the armies met, an advance force of 10,000 cavalry under Ali Quli Khan Shaibani came upon Hemu's artillery train, lightly guarded, and captured it when its escort fled. Hemu went into battle without guns. On the day itself Akbar and Bairam Khan stayed well to the rear, some eight miles from the field.

Hemu commanded a larger army, with about 30,000 Afghan cavalry and some 500 armoured war elephants carrying musketeers and crossbowmen; he himself rode an elephant named Hawai. He opened by sending elephants against both Mughal wings. Mughal horsemen who escaped the charge swung onto the flanks of his cavalry and shot into them, while the Mughal centre held a position behind a deep ravine that elephants and horses could not cross. Mughal riders also attacked the elephants, cutting at their legs and picking off their drivers. Even after losing his lieutenants Shadi Khan Kakar and Bhagwan Das, Hemu kept pressing, and both Mughal wings were pushed back. Then an arrow hit him in the eye and he collapsed in his howdah. His army, seeing him fall, broke and fled. About 5,000 men lay dead on the field, and many more were killed in flight.

Hemu's elephant was captured hours later and brought, with its unconscious rider, to the Mughal camp, where Bairam Khan urged Akbar to behead him. The court historian Abu'l-Fazl later wrote that Akbar refused to strike a dying man, but the contemporary writer Muhammad Arif Qandhari says that Akbar did kill him and took the title Ghazi; the refusal story is probably a later embellishment. Hemu's head was sent to Kabul, in modern Afghanistan, and his body was hung at a gate in Delhi. Some of his supporters and relatives were also executed. A memorial now marks the spot in Panipat where he died.

Adil Shah was killed in April 1557, and the Sur cause collapsed. The Mughals took 120 of Hemu's elephants and thereafter made elephants a central part of their own armies. Panipat had already seen the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 and would later give its name to the Third Battle of Panipat as well.

Our 1530 and 1600 maps show northern India before and after this period, the later one during Akbar's reign.