Second Battle of Tarain

The Second Battle of Tarain was fought in 1192 near Tarain, the modern town of Taraori in Haryana, roughly 110 kilometres north of Delhi. The Ghurid ruler Mu'izz al-Din Muhammad, often called Muhammad of Ghor, defeated a confederation of Rajput rulers led by Prithviraj Chauhan, king of the Chahamana dynasty. The victory opened the north Indian plain to the Ghurids and is usually seen as the point from which Muslim rule in northern India, and later the Delhi Sultanate, took root.

The two sides had already met on the same ground. In 1191, at the First Battle of Tarain, Prithviraj's army beat the Ghurid invaders, and Mu'izz al-Din was badly wounded. He withdrew to Ghazni, in present-day Afghanistan, and spent the following months preparing a second campaign to reverse the result.

The sizes of the two forces are uncertain. Firishta, writing centuries later in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, credited the Chauhan side with 3,000 elephants and 300,000 cavalry and infantry. Modern historians such as Satish Chandra and Kaushik Roy treat this as a large exaggeration, perhaps meant to magnify the scale of the Ghurid triumph, and Roy suggests it may reflect what all the Rajput states together could in theory have raised rather than the troops actually present. The chronicler Minhaj-i-Siraj gives Mu'izz al-Din 120,000 armoured men, including an elite cavalry force of 40,000 under his personal command. Indian works such as the Hammir Mahakavya and the Prithviraj Raso say that only part of Prithviraj's army was on the field, with the rest busy on other fronts. Roy's cautious view is that the Rajput army was probably the larger of the two.

This time the Ghurids avoided a head-on clash with the well-drilled Chahamana troops. According to the chronicler Hasan Nizami, an exchange of messages before the fighting led Prithviraj to believe that Mu'izz al-Din was seeking terms and would refer the matter to his brother, the senior Ghurid ruler. Several medieval writers describe this as a deliberate deception. The Ghurid army, organised in five divisions, then struck the Chahamana camp before sunrise.

Minhaj describes 10,000 mounted archers split into four groups, sent to harass the enemy from every side while refusing close combat, so that the Rajput elephants, horses and foot soldiers would tire themselves out. A fifth division staged a false retreat; when the Rajput troops charged after it, a fresh body of some 12,000 cavalry checked them, and the rest of the Ghurid army then attacked. The Chahamana forces broke and fled. Hasan Nizami put their dead at 100,000, a figure that cannot be checked; Ghurid losses are unknown.

Prithviraj left his elephant and escaped on horseback but, according to Minhaj, was captured in the neighbourhood of Sursuti. Most medieval sources say he was taken to his capital, Ajmer, where Mu'izz al-Din intended to keep him as a vassal, and that he was later executed after rebelling.

The Ghurids took over the Chahamana lands and placed Prithviraj's son Govindaraja IV on the throne at Ajmer as a dependent ruler. Prithviraj's brother Hariraja soon deposed him and recovered part of the kingdom, but was defeated by the Ghurid general Qutb al-Din Aibak. The Ghurids went on to defeat Jayachandra of the Gahadavala dynasty at the Battle of Chandawar and pushed their conquests across northern India as far as Bengal. These conquests led in time to the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, which held much of northern India until its last Lodi sultan fell to Babur at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526.

Our 1200 map shows northern India shortly after the battle, with the territory conquered from the Rajput kingdoms drawn as the Delhi Sultanate; the 1279 and 1300 maps show the sultanate's later growth.