In June 1576 Mewar's Charge at Haldighati Broke the Mughal Front Line, and by 1588 the Kingdom Had Retaken Much of Its Territory

The Battle of Haldighati was fought on a June morning in 1576 at the mouth of a narrow pass in the Aravalli hills of Mewar, between the army of Maharana Pratap and a Mughal army under Man Singh of Amber, then a prince of the Kachhwa house. Mewar’s cavalry charged first. Abul Fazl, Akbar’s court historian, writes that the enemy’s right wing “drove off the left wing of the imperialists” and that their vanguard also prevailed.

The Persian chroniclers record that by midday the Mughal side held the field and Pratap had left it alive. Historians read that result in more than one way, and this piece gives each reading under its author’s name. Maharana Pratap’s life is told elsewhere on tuput, and the earlier piece on Badauni and Abul Fazl gives their wording. This one covers the ground, the armies, the elephants, the horse, and the twelve years of Mewar’s own documents that follow.

A turmeric-coloured pass and two fields

Haldighati means turmeric pass. Jadunath Sarkar, who visited the ground in October 1934, wrote that a spur of the Aravalli range there takes the name because its rock, crushed, yields a bright yellow sand like turmeric powder. Rajasthan Tourism puts the pass about 40 kilometres from Udaipur, where it joins the districts of Rajsamand and Pali.

The armies met at the village of Khamnur, “the mouth of the Haldi defile,” in Abul Fazl’s words. Khamnor lies 14 miles north of Gogunda, Pratap’s base town, by Sarkar’s measure, with the spur between them. Man Singh had gathered his army at Mandalgarh and camped at Molela on the river Banas, which G. N. Sharma puts about two miles from Khamnor. Sharma, whose 1954 book Mewar and the Mughal Emperors draws on Rajasthani manuscripts as well as Persian chronicles, says two men could barely walk abreast on the path to the Rana’s position.

Badshahi Bagh, “the emperor’s garden,” is the plain below the pass. Sharma says Man Singh drew up his troops there, and Hooja says the name probably comes from the Mughal encampment. Rakta Talai, “the pond of blood,” is where Sharma puts the second phase of the fight, on the Banas with Khamnor and the village of Bhagal on either side. A different local memory reached Sarkar. His guide from Khamnor told him in 1934 that the Rajput dead were washed and cremated at the dried-up tank called Rakta Talai, and Sarkar wrote that this was their cremation ground and not the place where they fought. ThePrint reports the ASI’s description of it as about 4 kilometres from Haldighati and the last spot of the battle.

Two armies, both of them mixed

Badauni, who stood in the Mughal ranks, counted the Rana’s force at 3,000 horse. Man Singh, an officer of Akbar’s army (the ranks are explained in the piece on Akbar’s administration), commanded about 10,000 by Sarkar’s guess, of whom some 4,000 were Kachhwa clansmen of Amber and 5,000 or a little more Muslim imperial troops. Satish Chandra gives him 5,000. Later Rajput tradition grew far larger, and Tod in 1829 gives the Rajputs 22,000.

Neither army was of one kind. Sarkar and Sharma name Hakim Khan Sur and his Afghans in Pratap’s van, Ram Shah Tomar, the dispossessed ruler of Gwalior, with his three sons on the right, Jhala clansmen on the left, and Bhil archers under Punja at the rear. The Mughal line had Kachhwas under Jagannath and Madho Singh, Central Asian horse under Asaf Khan, and the Sayyids of Barha on the right. Chandra says the fight was mainly cavalry and elephants, and that the Rana, it seems, had no firearms.

The charge, and the second field

The date is 18 June in Sarkar and in Beveridge’s query-marked conversion of Abul Fazl’s date, and 21 June in Sharma and Hooja. By Sarkar’s reckoning the armies first clashed about three hours after sunrise, and in Abul Fazl it began when “a watch of the day had passed.” Hakim Khan Sur’s division came out of the pass and fell on about 80 Mughal skirmishers and then the vanguard. In Badauni, thorns, broken ground and a winding road mixed the two together, the Rajputs of the Mughal left under Lonkarn ran, and the Sayyids of Barha held the right. The rally came, he says, when Mihtar Khan brought up the rear with drums beating. A report spread that Akbar had arrived and the enemy lost heart, Abul Fazl writes, and Sharma and Hooja say Mihtar Khan spread it.

The second phase is where Sharma and Sarkar part. Sharma, citing Rajasthani manuscripts, has Bhils coming down from the slopes to attack the Mughal flanks and harass the camp until night. Sarkar thought the Bhils never drew a bow, because the Mughals did not enter the hills. Sarkar, Hooja and Tod each have a Jhala chief take the royal umbrella and draw the enemy while Pratap was led out, under three names: Bida, Man Singh Jhala and Manah. Ram Shah Tomar and his three sons fell, according to Abul Fazl.

The dead are counted several ways. About 150 imperial fighters and more than 500 on the other side died, by Abul Fazl’s count. Badauni says nearly 500 in all, Sarkar reckons 350 Mewar dead, and Sharma calls the Rajput sources’ figure of 20,000 dead wrong.

Lona, Ram Prasad and the elephant duels

The elephants have names in Abul Fazl. On Mewar’s side stood “the rank-breaking Lona.” Jamal Khan, an imperial commander, brought the elephant Gajmukta against it. The imperial elephant was about to flee, he writes, when a bullet struck the driver of Lona, and Lona turned back. Then Pertab, a relation of the Rana (Sarkar identifies him as Pratap Tonwar, a son of Ram Shah), brought forward Ram Prasad, which Abul Fazl calls the head of their elephants, and it threw down many men. An arrow killed Ram Prasad’s driver, and the elephant “became entered among the spoils.”

Badauni’s version has Man Singh seated on an elephant, and the driver of an imperial animal leaping across onto Ram Prasad after the Mewar driver fell. He adds that Akbar had asked the Rana for this elephant several times and been refused, and that he himself took it to court.

Chetak, and what the horse’s story rests on

Neither the Lowe nor the Beveridge translation uses the name Chetak, and the horse’s story comes from Mewar’s own tradition. Sharma, citing the Rajasthani manuscripts Amar Kavya Vamsavali and Phutkar Gita, has Pratap closing on Man Singh’s elephant, Chetak springing forward, the spear striking the elephant, and Man Singh leaning back in the howdah (the seat on an elephant’s back) while the elephant wheeled away. Chetak was hurt in a foreleg, and a platform called Chetak ka Chabutra stands where the horse fell, Sharma adds, with a small chhatri, a canopied memorial, beside it. Tod in 1829 has the horse leap a mountain stream and die, with an altar raised on the spot.

Historians separate the horse from the rest of the tale. Hooja writes that G. H. Ojha, G. N. Sharma and Raghubir Sinh rejected the meeting of Pratap with his brother Shakti Singh beside the fallen Chetak as a legend that begins with the seventeenth-century Raj Prashasti. Sharma notes that Badauni and the other Muslim annalists never name Shakti Singh in the campaign and that the Raj Ratnakar, a work of the same period, leaves the scene out. To Sarkar, the story of Chetak leaping onto Man Singh’s elephant looked like a copy of the English ballad of Chevy Chase.

Who read the result which way

When the news reached court, Abul Fazl says, Akbar gave thanks to God. Both Persian writers say the army did not pursue Pratap, Abul Fazl blaming heat and fatigue and Badauni fear of an ambush, and Badauni adds that Akbar barred Man Singh and Asaf Khan from court for some time.

In Sharma’s account the regular battle ended in a Mughal victory from which Man Singh gathered little, since his army at Gogunda lived on meat and mangoes. He says the record of a Rana’s victory in the Jagannath Rai inscription of Maharana Jagat Singh’s reign and in the Raj Ratnakar is “not worth credence,” and he credits Pratap with leaving the field and saving himself from capture, which served Mewar better than dying there. The Mughals could not hold Gogunda for want of provisions, Sarkar says. Hooja’s 2006 book states that victory lay with the imperial army. Chandra concludes that the battle “failed to break the existing stalemate.” ThePrint quotes Hooja as saying both sides claimed victory, Mewar because it had not surrendered and the Mughals because they held the field, and reports Chandra Shekhar Sharma of Udaipur arguing that Pratap’s army never retreated. Incredible India, the Ministry of Tourism’s site, says Pratap’s forces “could not claim victory,” while Rajasthan Tourism says he “fought a brave war.”

What Mewar did next, in its own documents

Two copper-plate grants dated the bright fifth of Bhadrapad, Vikram Samvat 1633 (1576), about three months after the battle, are the first sign of recovery Sharma cites. Issued from Kumbhalgarh, they gave the villages of Pipli and Sathana in central Mewar to a man named Balbhadra, and Sharma reads them as Pratap re-establishing his authority.

The Mughal side pressed on. Man Singh moved on Gogunda the next day, by Abul Fazl’s account, and Akbar followed in October. Kumbhalgarh, one of the hill forts of Rajasthan, fell to Shahbaz Khan on 3 April 1578, and Sharma quotes the line that the bird had flown, for Pratap had left the fort at midnight.

The turn came in the mid-1580s. Sharma calls Raja Jagannath’s expedition of December 1584 practically the last important invasion, and Chandra writes that Akbar moved to Lahore in 1585 and stayed twelve years, with no Mughal expedition against Pratap in that time. A Surkhand inscription of Jaishtha, Vikram Samvat 1642 (1585), shows Pratap freeing the Chhappan district from rival Rathors, and Sharma dates the move of his capital to Chavand to about the same year. From the Mughal outposts he took back 36 places, Sharma says, among them Udaipur, Mohi, Gogunda, Mandal and Pandwara. An inscription recording a land grant at Pander near Jahazpur, dated Kartika 1645 (1588), shows him issuing deeds in the north-east of Mewar. Chandra has Pratap recovering Kumbhalgarh and the areas near Chittor, and Sarkar the western part of the kingdom. All three agree that Chittor stayed in Mughal hands, and Sharma adds Mandalgarh.

Pratap died at Chavand on 19 January 1597, in Sharma’s account. The settlement came under Akbar’s successor, Sarkar writes, when Jahangir granted Pratap’s son Amar Singh an honourable peace.

The memorials and the sites today

The Rajasthan Tourism page says the Government of India proposed and built the Maharana Pratap National Memorial in 1997, a cenotaph of white marble columns with a bronze statue of the Maharana on Chetak.

The ASI’s list of centrally protected monuments for Rajasthan has Chetak Samadhi, Haldighati, Rakta Talai and Badshahi Bagh, all in Rajsamand district, and a Pratap Smarak at Chavand in Udaipur district. In 2021 the ASI took down plaques at Rakta Talai that its Jodhpur circle superintendent, Bipin Chandra Negi, said went up in 1975, when the sites belonged to the state tourism department. The plaque said circumstances forced the Rajputs to retreat and gave the date as 21 June 1576. Rajput groups and the Rajsamand MP had asked for its removal, and Negi said the new plaques would carry “proven historical facts.”

The Rajasthan High Court took up the upkeep of Haldighati and Rakta Talai on its own motion, in a case LiveLaw reported on 16 January 2026. It barred new construction at the sites without its approval, ordered a clean-up within 15 days and called for round-the-clock caretakers. In a Times of India report republished by Jaipur News, District Magistrate Arun Kumar Hasija said the pond at Rakta Talai would be revived and refilled and a government school inside the site demolished once the ASI gave permission. LiveLaw gives 28 February 2026 as the next hearing.