Prithviraj Chauhan

Prithviraja III, popularly called Prithviraj Chauhan, was a king of the Chahamana (Chauhan) dynasty who ruled from Ajmer, in present-day Rajasthan in north-western India, from 1177 until 1192. He defeated the Ghurid ruler Muhammad of Ghor at Tarain in 1191, but lost to him on the same field a year later and was put to death. Much of his popular image comes from later legend, above all the poem Prithviraj Raso.

Only a few inscriptions from his reign are known, none issued by the king himself. The only literary work from his lifetime, the Prithviraja Vijaya, is a court eulogy. Persian chronicles describe his wars with the Ghurids, while Jain and Hindu texts written centuries later add contradictory and sometimes demonstrably false episodes. The Prithviraj Raso, traditionally attributed to his court poet Chand Bardai, made him a great hero; historians treat most of its narrative as unhistorical.

Prithviraj was the son of King Someshvara and his queen Karpuradevi, and was born in Gujarat, where his father had grown up; a modern calculation from astrological details in the Prithviraja Vijaya places his birth in 1166. Someshvara died in 1177 and the boy, then about eleven, succeeded him, with his mother as regent and the chief minister Kadambavasa running affairs. He seems to have taken personal control around 1180. He soon put down a revolt by his cousin Nagarjuna.

Inscriptions of 1182 to 1183 record that he plundered the Chandela kingdom of Jejakabhukti, in present-day Bundelkhand. The legends make this a conquest, but the Chandela king Paramardi went on ruling for years, and historians such as Cynthia Talbot see it as a raid. He also fought the Chaulukyas of Gujarat, with uncertain results, before making peace by 1187. The famous story that he eloped with Samyogita, daughter of Jayachandra of Kannauj, is absent from most early sources, though some historians think it may have a basis in fact.

By the 1180s the Ghurid ruler Muhammad of Ghor had taken Multan, Peshawar and the Punjab, bringing him to Prithviraj's western frontier. Around 1190 to 1191 Muhammad seized Tabarhindah, probably modern Bathinda. Prithviraj marched against him with his allies and routed the Ghurid army at Tarain in 1191; Muhammad was wounded and withdrew. In 1192 Muhammad returned with a large cavalry army. According to the Persian accounts, he attacked the Chahamana camp at dawn, drew the defenders into a long pursuit with a feigned retreat, and then struck with a reserve of mounted archers. The Second Battle of Tarain ended in a crushing defeat. Later Persian figures for the armies are probably exaggerated. Prithviraj fled but was captured, and Ajmer was taken and its temples destroyed.

The sources disagree on how he died. A contemporary Persian historian says he was executed after being caught plotting against Muhammad, and coins bearing both their names suggest he may first have been kept on as a vassal. Other accounts say he was killed soon after his capture or died in captivity. The Raso's story that the blinded king killed Muhammad with an arrow at Ghazni is fiction: Muhammad ruled for more than a decade afterwards. The Ghurids placed Prithviraj's son Govindaraja on the throne of Ajmer as their vassal.

Early Persian chroniclers framed his fall as a victory of Islam and a milestone on the way to the Delhi Sultanate, while later Jain authors often cast him as a careless king betrayed by his own men. Later legend, including Abu'l-Fazl's account written at the court of Akbar, linked him with Delhi rather than his real capital, Ajmer. From the nineteenth century, writers such as James Tod called him "the last Hindu emperor", a label historians reject, since other Hindu rulers of his time and after were as powerful. Modern films and television often present him as a flawless hero and a symbol of Hindu national unity, an image that draws far more on the Raso tradition than on the sparse historical evidence.

Our 1200 map shows northern India eight years after his death, when the Ghurid conquests that followed Tarain were reshaping the region.