Who won the Second Battle of Tarain?
Muhammad of Ghor, the Ghurid sultan Mu'izz al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam, won the Second Battle of Tarain in 1192, defeating the Chahamana king Prithviraj Chauhan (Prithviraja III) near Taraori in modern Haryana. A year after being beaten on the same field, he divided his mounted archers into four bodies that harassed Prithviraj's army from every side and fell back whenever it charged, then broke its center with his best cavalry. Prithviraj was captured and executed, and within a generation northern India was under the rulers who founded the Delhi Sultanate.1
In 1191 Prithviraj Chauhan, king of Ajmer and overlord of Delhi, routed the invading army of Muhammad of Ghor at Tarain, and Muhammad himself barely escaped, carried off the field with a javelin wound in his arm. A year later he came back to the same field with a new army and a new plan. This time the result shaped the history of northern India for centuries.2
Part of Battles of India · Before: The Hydaspes, 326 BC · Next: First Panipat, 1526
The Ghurids reach India
The Ghurids came from Ghur, the mountain country east of Herat in what is now Afghanistan. Around 1162 Ghiyath al-Din took power there, and his younger brother Mu'izz al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam, known in India as Muhammad of Ghor or Shihab al-Din, served him loyally for four decades, mostly as governor of Ghazni. While Ghiyath al-Din fought for Khurasan in the west, Muhammad turned east.3
His Indian campaigns began in 1175, when he took Multan and Uch. In 1186 he annexed Lahore, the last possession of the Ghaznavid dynasty in the Punjab. Earlier Muslim victories in northern India had not led to lasting conquests. Muhammad meant to stay, and beyond the Punjab lay the Rajput kingdoms.4
Prithviraj Chauhan
Prithviraja III of the Chauhan, or Chahamana, dynasty was born around 1166 and came to the throne as a boy about 1177. His kingdom stretched from Thanesar in the north to Mewar in the south, with its capital at Ajmer and Delhi held by a kinsman. He crushed a rebellion by his cousin Nagarjuna, destroyed the Bhadanakas, beat the Chandela king Parmardin in 1182 and fought Gujarat.5
Each victory added enemies. His rivalry with Jayachandra, the Gahadavala king of Kannauj, became bitter, and tradition blamed it on Prithviraj's romance with Jayachandra's daughter Sanyogita, whom he carried off. Whether that story is history is still debated, but the enmity was real, and it mattered: when the Ghurids came for the second time, Jayachandra did not stand with him.6
Defeat at Tarain, 1191
Toward the end of 1190 Muhammad took the fortress the Muslim chroniclers call Tabarhindah, usually identified with Bhatinda (Dasharatha Sharma argues for Sirhind), on Prithviraj's northwestern frontier. Prithviraj marched against him with a large confederate army, supported by Jayachandra, and the two met at Tarain, today's Taraori, between Karnal and Thanesar, about 70 miles north of Delhi.7
Prithviraj's greater numbers drove both Ghurid wings from the field. Muhammad charged the Rajput center himself and came face to face with Govind Rai, Prithviraj's brother and governor of Delhi, mounted on an elephant. The sultan smashed Govind Rai's teeth with his lance; Govind Rai hurled a javelin into the sultan's upper arm. Muhammad nearly fell from his horse, and a young Khalaj soldier pulled him out of the fight. His army, believing him lost, fell back in despair until he was found and carried away on a litter of broken lances.8
The siege of Tabarhindah
The Ghurid army retreated across the Indus to Ghazni, but it left a garrison in Tabarhindah under the qazi of Tulak. Prithviraj laid siege to it, and the fortress held out, Minhaj-i-Siraj records, for thirteen months and a little more. The delay gave Muhammad the time he needed.9
The return
Muhammad spent the following year raising a far stronger army of Turks, Persians and Afghans, built around mounted archers. Minhaj, who wrote in the mid-13th century, some seventy years later, heard from a man who claimed to have marched with the sultan that the army numbered 120,000 horsemen; like all the chroniclers' figures for this campaign, the number cannot be checked. In 1192, the year 588 of the Hijra, Muhammad marched back to Tarain and found Prithviraj camped on the same field.10
Prithviraj again mustered a vast host with war elephants, but Britannica notes that quarrels in the Rajput camp had weakened him, and this time Jayachandra of Kannauj stayed away.11
Four divisions of archers
Muhammad left his baggage, his banners and his elephants several miles behind and advanced at a deliberate pace. His light horsemen he split into four divisions with orders to attack the enemy on the right and left, front and rear, 10,000 mounted archers on each side. When the Indian elephants, cavalry and infantry advanced on them, they were to turn and keep a horse's course ahead, shooting as they went, and never let themselves be caught.12
Prithviraj had no answer to the tactic. His army could not get to grips with an enemy that would not stand, and whenever part of it broke ranks to pursue, it was cut off. A later account summarized by Raverty has the harassment going on from about nine in the morning until the afternoon prayer. Slowly the great army lost its cohesion.13
When Muhammad judged the enemy exhausted, he struck with his fifth division, the flower of his army, straight at the center; one later account that Raverty cites puts it at some 12,000 horsemen. The Rajput host broke and fled. Britannica calls the second battle a study in mobility, where the first had turned on the sheer weight of Prithviraj's numbers on the Ghurid flanks.14
The fall of Prithviraj
Prithviraj, who had been riding an elephant, changed to a horse and fled. He was overtaken near the Sarsuti, the old Saraswati river, a short way from the field, and taken prisoner. Govind Rai of Delhi died in the battle, and Minhaj adds that the sultan recognized his head by the two teeth he had broken the year before.15
Minhaj says only that Prithviraj was put to death. Hasan Nizami, who began his chronicle within a generation, tells it differently, and Peter Jackson and Dasharatha Sharma follow him: Prithviraj was kept on at Ajmer for a short time as the sultan's vassal and was beheaded only after he was caught in a plot, and Ajmer then passed to his son as a tributary ruler. Britannica records that the king and many of his generals were executed.16
Delhi and the sultanate
Ajmer and the whole Siwalik country, Hansi and Sarsuti among it, fell to the Ghurids. Muhammad left his slave commander Qutb al-Din Aibak at Kuhram and went home. Aibak took Meerut, and in the following year Delhi itself. In 1194 the Ghurids crushed Jayachandra at Chandawar, and Bihar and Bengal followed. Britannica judges Tarain decisive: the whole of northern India, it says, was in Muslim hands within twenty years.17
Muhammad was murdered in 1206, by Khokhars according to some, by Ismailis according to others. By then the foundations of a new state had been laid: Britannica says the creation of what is known as the Delhi Sultanate owed much to the campaigns of Muhammad and his lieutenant Aibak. The sultanate held much of northern India for more than three centuries until Babur destroyed it at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526.18
Its first monument still stands in Delhi. Beside the Quwwat al-Islam, the Might of Islam, the first great mosque of the new rulers, they raised the Qutb Minar, which UNESCO dates from 1199 and describes as drawing on the architecture of their Ghurid homeland. At 72.5 meters, UNESCO notes, it is the tallest masonry tower in India.19
Prithviraj in legend
Prithviraj lost the battle and won the memory. Chand Bardai's epic, the Prithviraj Raso, made him a romantic, dashing hero, above all in the tale of his love for Sanyogita and her flight with him, which tradition places between the two battles of Tarain. Historians still debate how much of it happened, but the legend made Prithviraj one of the most celebrated heroes of Indian poetry.20
The weapon that beat him, the mounted archer who shot, wheeled away and shot again, was the classic arm of the Central Asian steppe. See horse archers and how they were beaten, the guide to the battles of India and the Middle Ages era page.
