Who won the Battle of Haldighati?
The Mughals won a tactical victory at Haldighati on 18 June 1576, holding the field against the Rajput ruler Maharana Pratap of Mewar at the mouth of a mountain pass in Rajasthan. The fight lasted from morning to midday. But Pratap escaped from the field, the Mughals were too exhausted to pursue him, and he fought on for two decades, becoming one of India's great symbols of defiance and freedom.5
A narrow mountain pass in Rajasthan, a small Rajput army and a larger one sent by the emperor Akbar. In 1576 Maharana Pratap of Mewar, the one Rajput prince who still refused to bow to the Mughals, threw his men at the enemy at Haldighati in a furious fight. Below is what happened in that pass, who commanded on each side, and why a lost battle made him a legend.6
Part of Battles of India · Before: Talikota, 1565 · Next: Sinhagad, 1670
Maharana Pratap did not defeat Akbar at Haldighati. On 18 June 1576 the Mughal army, commanded by Man Singh I of Amber, won the field. Akbar himself did not fight there: according to the historian Rima Hooja, he was absent from every stage of the battle. Pratap escaped, was never captured and carried on his resistance.7
The one Rajput who would not bow
The Mughal emperor Akbar had brought most of the Rajput princes into his empire through alliance or conquest, many sealing the bond by marriage. The fall of Chittor in 1568 and of Ranthambore in 1569 put almost all of Rajasthan under his overlordship. Pratap Singh of Mewar, the senior Rajput chief and proud heir of an ancient royal line, refused.8
Abu'l Fazl, Akbar's court historian, puts it in the language of the court: the Rana's arrogance had been swollen by the glory of his ancestors, the strength of his hills and the number of his Rajputs who would give their lives for honor. In the bardic tradition collected by James Tod in the 1820s, the final break came when Pratap refused to dine with Man Singh of Amber, a Rajput who had given his sister to the Mughals, and Man Singh rode away swearing to humble his pride. Tod's version cannot be checked, but both stories show a quarrel about honor as much as about land.9
Man Singh's army
In the spring of 1576 Akbar gave command of the campaign to Kunwar Man Singh, son of Raja Bhagwan Das of Amber, himself a Rajput in Mughal service. The historian Abd al-Qadir Badauni, who joined the expedition as a volunteer, records that the emperor sent 5,000 regular troopers with him, drawn from his own guard and from the contingents of his officers, under a long list of Muslim and Rajput commanders.10
Badauni had begged leave to go, saying he wanted to dye his black beard in blood for the emperor. Akbar asked if he was in earnest, sent him off with a gift of 56 gold coins and the promise that he would come back with news of victory. The imperial army gathered at Mandalgarh and then marched toward Gogunda, the Rana's home country, in the hills northwest of Udaipur.11
The armies at the pass
Abu'l Fazl gives the order of battle. Man Singh held the center on an elephant; the Sayyids of Barha were on the right, Ghazi Khan Badakhshi and Rai Lonkaran of Sambhar on the left, Jagannath and Asaf Khan in the van, Madho Singh with a reserve, and Mihtar Khan in the rear. On the Mewar side the Rana took the center. Ram Shah, the exiled raja of Gwalior, held the right wing, Bida Jhala the left and Ram Das, son of the great Jaimal of Chittor, the van. Muslims and Hindus fought on both sides: one of the Rana's divisions was led by the Afghan Hakim Sur.12
How many men stood on each side is not known exactly. Badauni, who rode with the Mughals, puts the Rana's force at about 3,000 horse and gives the strength of the force Akbar first sent; Abu'l Fazl counts neither army. The historian Jadunath Sarkar adds that the only foot soldiers on the Mewar side were Bhil archers, probably no more than 400, and judges Man Singh's whole command at about 10,000 men: some 4,000 of his own Kachhwaha clansmen, up to 1,000 other Hindu auxiliaries and 5,000 or a little more imperial troops. Tod's bards gave Pratap 22,000 Rajputs, a figure from song rather than record, and Rima Hooja, weighing the conflicting sources, notes how often they contradict one another.13
The Rajput charge
The armies met, Abu'l Fazl writes, on 18 June 1576, a watch after sunrise, at the village of Khamnor, which lies at the mouth of the Haldi defile, the pass named for its yellow, turmeric-colored soil. The date is in the Julian calendar, which was still in use in Europe until 1582; Tod's bardic chronology puts the battle in July. Britannica, following the old name of the district, also calls it the Battle of Gogunda.14
The first blow was Mewar's. One division under Hakim Sur came straight out of the hills against the Mughal skirmishers, who were tangled in broken, thorny ground and a twisting road and were routed. The Rajputs on the Mughal left, Badauni admits, ran like a flock of sheep and broke through their own vanguard to the right. In the confusion he asked Asaf Khan how to tell friendly Rajputs from hostile ones, and was told to shoot regardless: whichever side lost men, it would be a gain to Islam.15
The Rana's second division charged out of the pass, swept away the troops at its mouth and broke through the Mughal center. Some of the fleeing imperial troops did not stop until they were five or six kos beyond the river. For a while, Abu'l Fazl concedes, it looked to the superficial as if the enemy was winning.16
The elephants
The battle was saved by the Mughal reserve. Mihtar Khan came up from the rear beating his kettledrums and shouting that the emperor himself had arrived, and the fugitives rallied. Akbar was in fact far away; Rima Hooja calls the rumor a ploy that worked. Ram Shah of Gwalior, who always fought in front of the Rana, did prodigies of valor against Man Singh's Rajputs, and the Sayyids of Barha held their ground on the right when everything else was giving way.17
Then the elephants met. Man Singh, Badauni writes, sprang into the driver's seat of his own elephant. The Rana's great war elephant Ram Prasad fought one of the emperor's own elephants until an arrow killed its driver; the imperial driver leapt across onto Ram Prasad and took it. Ram Prasad, an animal Akbar had long demanded from the Rana, was carried off as the prize of the day.18
The turn of the day
The Rajput leaders fell one after another. Ram Das, son of Jaimal, was killed by Jagannath. Ram Shah of Gwalior died with his sons, three of them according to Abu'l Fazl, fighting to the end. Arrows rained on the Rana, who now faced Madho Singh, and Hakim Sur's division, pushed back by the Sayyids, fell back on him. Pratap turned and rode for the high mountains.19
The Mughals did not follow. It was the height of summer, so hot, Badauni writes, that the brain boiled in the skull, and the troops had fought from early morning until midday. Expecting the Rana to lie in ambush in the hills, they went back to their camp to care for the wounded, and the next day Man Singh marched into Gogunda.20
Counting the dead
The two Mughal chroniclers roughly agree. Badauni counts nearly five hundred dead on the field, 150 of them Muslims and the rest Hindus, and more than three hundred Mughal wounded. Abu'l Fazl gives about 150 imperial dead and more than 500 distinguished men of the enemy. In Tod's bardic account, five hundred of Pratap's kinsmen fell, along with Ram Shah of Gwalior and 350 of his Tomar clan.21
The victory pleased Akbar less than it should have. He was vexed, Badauni says, that the pursuit had been given up and the Rana left alive, and for a time he barred Man Singh and Asaf Khan from court. Badauni, by contrast, was honored, and was sent to Fatehpur Sikri with the report of the victory and the captured elephant Ram Prasad.22
Chetak and the legend
Mewar remembered the day differently. In the tradition Tod recorded, Pratap was carried out of the battle by his blue horse Chetak, who leapt a mountain stream with two Mughal chiefs at his heels. Pratap's estranged brother Sakta, or Shakti Singh, who had gone over to the Mughals, saw him fleeing alone, rode after him, killed the pursuers and embraced his brother for the first time in their lives. There Chetak fell dead of his wounds. An altar marked the spot, Tod wrote, and the scene was painted on the walls of half the houses of Udaipur.23
Tod, a British officer writing from the bards' songs, also has Prince Salim leading the Mughal army, which the court chronicles do not support, so his account is best read as legend. But it is the legend that lasted. Nor will Haldighat be forgotten, Tod wrote, while a Sisodia occupies Mewar or a bard survives to tell the tale.24
Twenty more years of war
The Mughals held the field, but they could not capture Pratap or subdue Mewar. Akbar himself marched toward the Rana's mountains later that year. Pratap kept up raids and resistance from his hill fastnesses until his death in 1597, when his son Amar Singh took up the struggle, and Mewar did not finally acknowledge the Mughals until 1615.25
Across India Pratap is revered as a symbol of resistance, honor and refusal to submit, and Haldighati is remembered as his defining stand. It takes its place among the greatest battles in Indian history, from the Hydaspes to Kohima. Akbar's own road to power began twenty years earlier, at the Second Battle of Panipat in 1556.26› Second Battle of Panipat, 1556
Could you name a battle from a single scene? Try Guess the Battle or play today's Battle of the Day. For more of the period, see the early modern era.
