Badauni Fired Into the Rajput Ranks at Haldighati in 1576 and Called It a Mughal Victory. In 2017 a Rajasthan Textbook Said Pratap Won.

On 18 June 1576, by the date most histories give, the scholar Abd al-Qadir Badauni was with a Mughal army in a narrow valley in Mewar when his own side began to break. The Rajputs fighting for the Mughals, he wrote later, “ran away like a flock of sheep.” The lines had mixed in broken ground, Rajputs were fighting on both sides, and Badauni put a question to the commander beside him, Asaf Khan. “How are we now in these circumstances to distinguish between friendly and hostile Rajputs?”

In W. H. Lowe’s English translation of 1884, Asaf Khan answered: “They will experience the whiz of the arrows, be what may.” He went on: “On whichever side there may be killed, it will be a gain to Islam.” Badauni kept shooting. “So we kept firing away,” he wrote, “and our aim at such a mountain-like mass of men never missed.”

The earlier tuput piece on Maharana Pratap tells his life from start to finish. This one stays with the sources for Haldighati, the argument over who won, and what the Mewar record says about the years after.

Two Persian accounts, and a footnote that ranks them

Badauni was in the fight and wrote his history, the Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh, afterwards. Abul Fazl, Akbar’s court historian, wrote the Akbarnama from the court. He records that the army sent a report of the battle to Akbar, along with the captured elephant Ram Prasad, and that Badauni carried both. H. Beveridge, who translated the Akbarnama, put a footnote beside the battle that ranks the two: “The best account of the battle is that given by Badayuni.”

Gogunda, the Rana’s town, gives Badauni his name for the battle: “the victory of Kokandah.” Abul Fazl places the armies at the village of Khamnur, “the mouth of the Haldi defile,” and Beveridge notes that the battle “is usually called that of Haldighat.” Britannica puts the pass about 12 miles from Gogunda. Both writers call the Rana Kika, and a footnote in Lowe says he was “also called Pratab, or Partab.” Beveridge dates the battle “18th ? June 1576,” converting from 21 Rabi I, and notes that Badauni puts it at the beginning of that month. James Tod, writing in 1829, has it in July.

Three thousand horse against Man Singh’s Rajputs

By Badauni’s count Pratap came on “with a force of 3,000 horse.” Man Singh’s numbers he leaves out. Jadunath Sarkar, who visited the ground in October 1934 and wrote the battle up in his Military History of India, called ten thousand “as fair a guess as we can make today”: about four thousand of Man Singh’s own Kachhwa clansmen from Amber, one thousand or fewer other Hindu auxiliaries, and five thousand or a little more Muslim imperial troops. Sarkar gave the Rana about four hundred Bhil bowmen under a chief named Punja, and thought they never drew a bow, because the Mughals did not enter the hills.

Commanders on both sides came from mixed backgrounds. Hakim Khan Sur, an Afghan, led the Rana’s first charge, by Badauni’s account. Abul Fazl puts Ram Shah, the dispossessed Raja of Gwalior, on the Rana’s right, a Jhala chief on the left, and Ram Das, son of the Chittor defender Jaimal, in the van. On the imperial side Abul Fazl lists Jagannath and Asaf Khan in the van and Man Singh in the centre. Both name Rai Lonkaran of Sambhar, a Rajput, on the left, and Badauni says the Rajputs under him were the ones who ran.

Badauni’s tally of the dead makes the point in numbers: “Nearly five hundred men were slain,” of whom “one hundred and fifty were of the people of Islam, and the rest Hindus.” The historian Satish Chandra, in Medieval India: Mughal Empire, draws the conclusion: “With both the Hindus and the Muslims divided, the battle of Haldighati can scarcely be considered a struggle between Hindus and Muslims.” He adds that it was not a struggle for Rajput independence either, since “influential sections of the Rajputs had already cast their lot with the Mughals,” and that at best it was “an assertion of the principle of local independence.” The Kachhwas who took the other road are part of who the Rajputs were, and Akbar’s wider dealings with his Hindu subjects are in the piece on shared saints.

One detail needs a warning. Sarkar retells Asaf Khan’s line as “On whichever side a man falls, it is a gain to Islam because it is one Hindu the less.” The last clause is Sarkar’s. It is not in Lowe’s translation of Badauni.

What the field looked like before noon

Abul Fazl does not hide the first hour. “The enemy’s right wing drove off the left wing of the imperialists,” he writes, “and their vanguard also prevailed. Many of the imperialists gave way.” Jammed in broken ground and thorn, the advance guard “sustained a complete defeat,” Badauni says, and the troops who fled in the first attack did not stop until they were five or six cosses beyond the river, a coss being roughly two miles.

Two things turned it. For Badauni the credit goes to the Sayyids of Barha, who held the right wing, and to a commander called Mihtar Khan, who came up from the rear “beating his kettle-drums” and called on the troops to rally. In Abul Fazl’s version a report went round that Akbar himself had arrived, a cry went up from the combatants, and the enemy, who had been gaining, “lost heart.” Chandra Shekhar Sharma, a historian who argues for Pratap, reads the same passage as a trick, with Mihtar Khan stopping the Mughal army “by a fake news of Akbar’s arrival,” as The Wire reports his book.

Elephants figure in both accounts. Ram Prasad, the Rana’s chief elephant, lost its driver to an arrow and was taken. Akbar had demanded that animal of the Rana several times and been refused, Badauni says, and when Badauni presented it at Fatehpur Sikri Akbar renamed it Pir-prasad. The Rana, in Badauni’s words, “turned and fled” to the high mountains. In Abul Fazl he “fled and hastened to the defiles of the hill-country.”

The fighting ran from early morning until midday, so hot, Badauni says, that “the very brain boiled in the cranium.” Three counts of the dead survive. Nearly 500 in all is Badauni’s figure. On the imperial side, Abul Fazl gives “about 150 ghazis,” fighters for the faith, dead, and “more than 500 distinguished men” on the enemy’s. Sarkar reckons 350 dead for Mewar and about 150 dead and 350 wounded for the imperialists.

Why nobody chased him

Both writers say the Mughals let Pratap go, and both give reasons. “On account of the excessive heat and the fatigue of the battle the imperialists did not set their hearts on pursuing the enemy,” is Abul Fazl’s explanation. Fear of an ambush is Badauni’s addition: “the idea became prevalent that the Rana, by stealth and stratagem, would keep himself concealed behind the mountains. This was the reason why they made no pursuit.”

Akbar did not accept the excuse. The emperor, Badauni says, sent a man to examine the battlefield, who came back and reported how each commander had conducted himself. “Only he was vexed at their having abandoned the pursuit of the Rana, and so allowing him to remain alive.” Then, “on account of certain faults which they had committed,” Akbar barred Man Singh and Asaf Khan “for some time from the Court.” A footnote by Lowe gives a second explanation from the history he calls the Tarikh Nizami: that what displeased Akbar was that the two commanders would not allow the Rana’s country to be plundered. The army itself was short of grain and, Badauni says, lived on meat and mangoes, “and from its extreme juiciness very many of them became ill.”

The man who took the news to court adds a line about the road. “Wherever we passed, the circumstances of the battle were published, but the people would not credit our statements.”

Akbar comes himself, and the Rana goes into the hills

Akbar left Ajmer for Gogunda about 11 October 1576, according to Abul Fazl. Meanwhile the Rana “went into the hill country,” and Akbar sent Qutbuddin Khan, Raja Bhagwant Das and Man Singh “into the hollows of the hills” to find him. Qutbuddin Khan and Bhagwant Das found no trace of him and came back to court “without orders,” and Abul Fazl records that they were “excluded from the bliss of doing homage and were reproved.” Akbar marched toward the Rana’s country, Badauni says, where the Rana “was pillaging in the mountain district” of Udaipur.

For years afterward the chase went on. Kumbhalgarh, a fort few had ever taken, fell to Shahbaz Khan on 3 or 4 April 1578, by Beveridge’s conversion of Abul Fazl’s date. Pratap “fled to the hills,” Abul Fazl says, and Shahbaz Khan went on to take Gogunda and, at midnight, Udaipur. In Badauni the Rana “effected his escape from the fortress” one night “and took refuge in another mountain-fastness.” In December 1578 Shahbaz Khan went out again, against a Rana who “had raised the head of turbulence.”

Late in 1584 the Rana “had come out of the defiles of the mountains” again, Abul Fazl reports, and Jagannath was sent to Ajmer with an army. The entry ends: “Though there was no victory, yet the oppressed were delivered.”

The same pages, read two ways

Sarkar’s verdict on Haldighati, in 1960, was that it “proved a barren victory.” Gogunda fell to the Mughals, he wrote, “but they could not oust the Rana from his north-western hills,” and as soon as the army of occupation withdrew the Rana “came out of hiding” and took back the western part of his kingdom. Britannica’s entry on the battle reads the same way: “The Mughals were victorious, but the Battle of Gogunda became legendary for the heroic Rajput resistance against heavy odds.”

Rima Hooja, a historian of Rajasthan, put it differently in a 2018 interview. “In this case, Pratap left the field,” she said, but he did not surrender, was not captured, and none of his substitute commanders surrendered. If one took the “Pratap won” line, she added, “it is very strange that you fought a guerrilla warfare for many more years and you are not able to push everyone out of the kingdom.” She called the result “inconclusive,” and said both sides lost people and both won honour. She also said Akbar “didn’t announce victory in his darbar.” Abul Fazl’s account of that moment differs: when the news reached court on 12 Tir, he says, Akbar “returned thanks to God.”

In 2017 the argument moved into the classroom. A BJP legislator, Mohan Lal Gupta, proposed in February that Rajasthan’s history books say Pratap won. Three ministers backed him, and one of them, Kalicharan Saraf, told The Indian Express, as Scroll reported, “A distorted version of history has been taught to generations of students.” Pankaj Jha, in Newslaundry, quotes the Class X textbook as now saying: “Neither was the battle of Haldighati inconclusive nor was it won by Akbar.”

The case for the new reading comes from Chandra Shekhar Sharma of Rajasthan University, whose book Rashtra Ratna Maharana Pratap was added to the university’s reading list. Land grants issued by Pratap in four villages after the battle, he says, “prove that Pratap had an effective control over the plains.” Jha answers that by Sharma’s own account Pratap issued such deeds only until about 1580, and that this “does not and cannot prove” his whole territory stayed under his control. The medieval historian Harbans Mukhia told The Wire that “one is getting tired of having to react to the ‘history’ being manufactured at will.”

The defenders have a real point. Pratap was never captured, he kept issuing grants, and the Persian chroniclers admit the Mughals gave up chasing him. The same chroniclers wrote that they won the field and that the Rana fled it. Badauni, Abul Fazl and Britannica call it a Mughal victory. Sharma’s book and the 2017 textbook do not.

What Tod added

Several of the best-known stories about Haldighati are in James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, which appeared in 1829, more than 250 years after the battle. Tod was an East India Company officer. His sources were the annals and bardic verse of Mewar, and his version differs from the Persian ones in ways that can be checked.

In Tod’s telling, Prince Selim, Akbar’s heir, “led the war.” Britannica gives Jahangir’s birth as 31 August 1569, which would make him six. Twenty-two thousand Rajputs took the field, Tod says, and “only eight thousand quitted the field alive.” Sarkar called the Mewar tradition’s totals “inflated” and set them beside the story that Chetak, Pratap’s horse, leapt onto Man Singh’s elephant, which he compared to the English ballad of Chevy Chase. Tod does tell the Chetak story, and has the horse leap a stream and die. Yet Tod’s own sentence on the aftermath reads: “Elate with victory, Selim left the hills.”

The grass-cake story is in Tod too, along with a letter in which Pratap asked Akbar to ease his hardships. The writer R. Ganesh, in the magazine Prekshaa, says “there is absolutely no record of Rana Pratap writing any such letter to Akbar.” In Tod the turning point is the minister Bhama Sah, who gave Pratap wealth “stated to have been equivalent to the maintenance of twenty-five thousand men for twelve years.” Larger sums in coins circulate online. I could not trace them to Tod or to any document I could open.

After that gift, Tod says, Pratap surprised Shahbaz Khan “in his camp at Deweir,” killed his troops, took Kumbhalgarh and thirty-two fortified posts, and recovered all Mewar except Chittor, Ajmer and Mandalgarh. His line about the two battles is the best known in the book: “Huldighat is the Thermopylae of Mewar; the field of Deweir her Marathon.” I could not find Dewair, under any spelling, in the Lowe and Beveridge translations of Badauni and Abul Fazl, and I could not fix a date for it from Tod’s text.

The last years

Britannica says that in 1584, when Akbar was preoccupied in the Punjab, Pratap again turned down his envoys and “was able to recover most of his strongholds and died a hero to his people.” Abul Fazl’s entry for late 1584 shows Mughal troops still being sent after him, without a victory.

Sources disagree on the date of death. Britannica says 19 January 1597. Onmanorama, in a 2020 report from Chavand, the town south of Udaipur where it says he set up his last capital, gives 29 June 1597. In Tod there is only the year. He has Pratap dying because “a mind diseased preyed on an exhausted frame,” after making his chiefs swear not to let mansions be built until Mewar had recovered its independence. Hooja says the Rajasthani annals claim Akbar shed a tear at the news. Akbar outlived Pratap by nearly eight years.

Jahangir summed up his father’s Mewar campaigns in his memoirs. Akbar, he wrote, “exerted himself greatly to put down these rebels,” the Ranas of Mewar, and each time the imperial forces pressed the Rana hard “in order to capture him or make him a fugitive, but it so happened that this was not effected.” Pratap’s son Amar Singh made peace with Jahangir’s son Khurram in the Persian month of Bahman, which fell in early 1615. Jahangir wrote that Amar Singh begged to be excused from coming to court “on account of his old age” and would send his heir Karan instead.

When Amar Singh paid his respects to Khurram he gave him a celebrated ruby. Jahangir recorded where it had been. The Rathor chief Rao Maldeo’s son sold it to Rana Uday Singh. “From him it went to Rana Partap, and afterwards to this Rana Amar Singh.”