What happened at the Second Battle of Panipat?
The Mughal army of the young emperor Akbar, led in his name by the regent Bairam Khan, won on 5 November 1556. Hemu, who had seized Delhi a month earlier, was hit in the eye by an arrow, his army fled, and he was captured and put to death.1
On 5 November 1556, on the plain of Panipat north of Delhi, the army of the boy emperor Akbar, commanded in his name by the regent Bairam Khan, defeated Hemu, the general who a month earlier had taken Delhi and claimed a crown of his own. One arrow ended a battle Hemu seemed to be winning and decided who would rule northern India for the next half century. It is one of the great turning points of Indian history.2
Part of Battles of India · Before: First Panipat, 1526 · Next: Talikota, 1565
Background: an empty throne
Thirty years earlier Akbar's grandfather Babur had won the First Battle of Panipat on the same plain. His son Humayun was driven out of India by the Afghan ruler Sher Shah Sur and won back Delhi only months before he died, after a fall on the stairs of his library, in January 1556. Akbar, aged thirteen, was proclaimed emperor at Kalanaur in Punjab in February 1556, with Bairam Khan as his guardian.3
Hemu, the general of the Sur dynasty
Sher Shah's dynasty had split between rival claimants. One of them, Muhammad Adil Shah, called Adali, relied on a minister named Hemu. The Afghan historian Ahmad Yadgar calls him a weighman in the bazaar, and Mughal chroniclers scornfully call him a grocer. Yet even Abul Fazl, Akbar's court historian, credits him with twenty-two battles for his master without a defeat, a record the historian Jadunath Sarkar accepted.4
When Humayun died, Hemu marched west, leaving Adil Shah at Chunar, and the Mughal governor of Agra abandoned his city. Abul Fazl says Hemu came on with 50,000 cavalry, 1,000 elephants, 51 cannon and 500 falconets, figures Sarkar repeats. On 7 October 1556 the governor of Delhi, Tardi Beg, met him at Tughlaqabad outside the city. Part of the Mughal line routed the troops facing it and rode off in pursuit, but Hemu had held back picked elephants and horsemen. He charged the thinly held Mughal center, Tardi Beg fled, and Hemu took Delhi.5
The battle at Tughlaqabad showed how Hemu fought. Abul Fazl and Sarkar both describe the Mughal vanguard and left wing driving back the Afghans in front of them, killing more than 3,000 men and taking 400 elephants, and then riding after the fugitives or stopping to plunder. Hemu had kept back his best elephants and a body of picked horsemen for that moment. After he broke Tardi Beg's center, he did not chase him but held his army in its ranks on the field, and the Mughal riders who came back from the pursuit found the battle lost and scattered without fighting again.6
Hemu now acted for himself. He shared the plunder among his Afghan officers, raised the royal canopy and took the ancient royal title of Vikramaditya, written Bikramajit in the Persian chronicles. The Panipat district administration and his biographer Nitish Sharma say he was crowned in Delhi's Purana Qila; the district site gives the date as 7 October.7
The war was fought in a starving country. A famine raged in 1555 and 1556, worst around Delhi and Agra, where the armies were gathered. Abul Fazl, then a small boy in Agra, writes that men took to eating one another, and Badauni says he saw it with his own eyes. Badauni alone accuses Hemu of feeding his 500 elephants on rice, sugar and butter while the people died, a charge that Smith notes the other historians do not repeat.8
The Mughal decision to fight
Some of Akbar's officers advised a retreat to Kabul, but Bairam Khan chose to fight for Hindustan. At Sirhind he had Tardi Beg killed in his tent, with a sort of permission from the boy according to Badauni, while Akbar was out hawking according to Abul Fazl.9
Bairam Khan's decision rested on a hard calculation. Smith argued that letting Tardi Beg's failure go unpunished would probably have cost Akbar both his throne and his life, and quoted the later historian Firishta, who heard from well-informed men that the execution made the quarrelsome Chagatai officers submit to Bairam's authority. Abul Fazl, for his part, presents Bairam and Tardi Beg as rivals and says the regent used the defeat at Delhi to remove the man who saw himself as leader of the army.10
The armies and their commanders
Numbers are uncertain. Abul Fazl singles out 500 choice elephants in Hemu's line, while Badauni and Nizam al-Din Ahmad credit him with 1,500. Abul Fazl gives Hemu 30,000 Rajput and Afghan horsemen, as do Sarkar and the Panipat district history. The Mughal advance force that fought numbered 10,000, of whom perhaps 5,000 were real fighting men according to Abul Fazl. Hemu commanded the center, with Shadi Khan Kakar on his right and his sister's son Ramya on his left. Ali Quli Khan Shaibani, later Khan Zaman, led the Mughal center. Akbar and Bairam Khan stayed miles behind the line under guard.11
Hemu prepared his elephants with care. Abul Fazl and Sarkar describe them protected by mail and armor, with musketeers and crossbowmen on their backs, and Abul Fazl lists the great elephants by name together with the officers given charge of them. On the Mughal side the two sources give the same order of battle: Sikandar Khan Uzbak on the right, Abdullah Khan Uzbak on the left, Ali Quli Khan in the center, and a vanguard under Husain Quli Beg and Shah Quli Mahram.12
The lost guns
Hemu sent his artillery train ahead toward Panipat. The Mughal advance guard under Ali Quli Khan took the guns; Abul Fazl and Sarkar say the escort fled without a stand, Badauni and Nizam al-Din mention some fighting. In Sarkar's judgment Hemu now fought without a single field gun.13
Akbar and Bairam Khan were still on the road when the fighting began. Abul Fazl says the royal camp marched that morning from Karnal and halted short of Panipat, and that news of the clash at the vanguard arrived before the soldiers had shaken off the dust of the march. Sarkar places the boy and his guardian about 20 miles behind the fighting troops, and Smith agrees that Bairam left the conduct of the battle to his lieutenants.14
The battle on 5 November 1556
Abul Fazl dates the battle to 2 Muharram 964, which he equates with 5 November 1556. Hemu rode his elephant Hawai. His elephants charged first and threw both Mughal wings into confusion. Mughal riders, whose horses would not face the beasts, swung around and struck the flanks and rear, shooting and cutting at animals and drivers: the classic answer to war elephants.15
The Mughal center had halted behind a deep ravine that elephants could not cross, and its archers kept shooting. When the elephants drew back, Ali Quli Khan led his men around to hit the Afghan center from behind. Hemu led counter-charges in person, while two of his leading officers, Bhagwan Das and Shadi Khan Kakar, were killed near him. Both Sarkar and Smith thought the outnumbered Mughals would probably have lost if Hemu had not fallen.16
Who won the Second Battle of Panipat and why?
The Mughal army of the thirteen-year-old Akbar, led by the regent Bairam Khan, won. Hemu's larger army seemed to be winning until an arrow struck him in the eye and he collapsed in his howdah; his leaderless troops fled. He had also lost his artillery before the battle, and Mughal archers blunted his elephants.17
The arrow in the eye
Badauni writes that Hemu, bareheaded and shouting his war cry, was struck by "the arrow of death which no shield can ward off." Abul Fazl and Nizam al-Din say it went through the eye socket and out of the back of his head; Ahmad Yadgar says it hit his forehead. When his men saw him fall, the retreat became a rout.18
A Mughal officer, Shah Quli Khan Mahram, came upon Hemu's elephant. In Abul Fazl's and Badauni's versions the driver pointed out his master to save his own life; Nizam al-Din says the driver was dead and Shah Quli's man found Hemu lying in the howdah. Hemu was brought, still alive, to the imperial camp.19
Who killed Hemu? The accounts disagree
Abul Fazl and Ahmad Yadgar say Bairam Khan urged Akbar to strike the captive and so earn the title of ghazi, a warrior for the faith; Badauni gives the request to a cleric, Shaikh Gada-i. Abul Fazl, the official historian, says the boy refused to kill a prisoner and Bairam struck Hemu down himself. Badauni has Akbar refuse because Hemu was already as good as dead, and Bairam strike first before others finished him. Nizam al-Din says Bairam killed him with his own hand. Ahmad Yadgar, however, says Akbar did strike. Smith followed him and called the refusal story "the late invention of courtly flatterers"; Sarkar wrote that Bairam beheaded Hemu.20
Hemu's head was sent to Kabul to be displayed, and his body was gibbeted at a gate of Delhi. His elderly father was later caught near Alwar; according to Abul Fazl he refused to change his religion and was killed.21
Casualties
Abul Fazl says 5,000 dead were counted on the field, with many more cut down in the flight, a figure Sarkar accepts. The victors raised a tower of the heads of the slain. Badauni says nearly 1,500 elephants were taken; Abul Fazl gives about 1,500 in one passage and 1,600 in another. None of the main chroniclers gives a figure for Mughal losses.22
Aftermath: the Mughal restoration
The next day the army marched straight to Delhi, which opened its gates to Akbar. Bairam Khan governed until 1560, when Akbar dismissed him and took power himself; Akbar reigned until his death in 1605. The empire won back at Panipat became the base for his later conquests, among them the war in Mewar that led to the Battle of Haldighati in 1576.23
Panipat also finished the Sur dynasty. Akbar stayed about a month in Delhi, then marched against the last Sur claimant in the Punjab, Sikandar Sur, who held out in the hill fort of Mankot until he surrendered in May 1557 and was given lands in the east. Hemu's nominal master, Muhammad Adil Shah, was killed in battle the same year by the son of a ruler of Bengal whom he had once slain. With all his rivals gone, Smith writes, Akbar was free to consolidate his rule.24
The Mughal side and its chroniclers
Almost everything we know comes from the winners. Abul Fazl's Akbarnama, the official history of the reign, presents the victory as proof of divine favor and calls Hemu arrogant and ill-fated. Yet it also admits: "Certainly he was a most excellent servant, and he had a lofty spirit," and regrets that he was not kept alive. Badauni writes in openly religious terms, calling Hemu an unbeliever and the fight a holy war.25
Hemu's side and his memory today
No account from Hemu's own camp survives in our sources; the Afghan view comes mainly from Ahmad Yadgar's history of the Afghan sultans, which ends with Hemu's death. Sarkar called him the best military mind on the Afghan side after Sher Shah and argued that court writers had blackened his name. In modern India he is widely remembered as a self-made ruler who briefly held Delhi, and a recent biography by Nitish Sharma argues that the chroniclers reduced him to a footnote.26
At Panipat a memorial, Hemu's Samadhi Sthal, honors him; the district administration says his supporters built it at Saudhapur on the Jind road, where he was beheaded. The same plain saw another great clash in 1761, the Third Battle of Panipat.27
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